002. Ierosolimon Apartment
Apartment Renovation
Amerikis Square, Athens
Status: Completed or Always Under Construction
The project concerns the renovation of a second floor 70sqm apartment in Amerikis Square. The aim was to unify as many spaces as possible yet still marking the different activities taking place.
The apartment flow was notionally split in four different rituals: sleeping, bathing, reading, eating, all of equal importance to the inhabitants and blending with each other, yet remaining significantly different. The living room is centred around a wall-length library that also doubles as a play space for the cat. The kitchen island becomes simultaneously a world of eating and conversing. The custom made extractor, a hut in itself, humorously points out the importance of cooking.
The bathroom, hidden behind a sage green box, consists of the shower and toilet in contrasting earthy tones and Aliveri marble.
At winter, around 16:00, there is a strip of sunlight shining directly through the balcony doors, behind the kitchen, onto the textured white tiles, for a minute of two. And this very moment became the reason of the fluted glass window behind the sink.
The ritual of washing is marked by an external sink (an ode to LeCorbusier), surrounded by circular mirrors and emerald tiles, becoming a pool of water, under the moon, in the forest.
Different layers of privacy are achieved through translucent materials like fluted glass, reclaimed and cut from the apartments’ old sliding doors.
A carefully selection of materials with different textures compliment a laborious reveal of the apartments’ existing surfaces (column and beam, dining wall) stripped down to their bare natural state by ourselves. The project is an exploration on the poetics of inhabiting.
