Apartment in Mandelstam’s house
Moscow, 2022
Total area – 75м²
The work on this project started as a challenge for our studio. The apartment is located on Starosad pereulok, in Kitay-Gorod, in a house built in the late 21st century, in a neighborhood where the spirit of an old Moscow is still living, where a Russian poet Osip Mandelstam lived and worked. The house is a cultural heritage site.
This tenement building early in the past century was divided into communal apartments, and some of the windows were closed up in favor of more advantageous division of space into units. That was the apartment we have got – a corner one, with a big potential, but with closed up windows and the reduced doorways. That is why our primary task was to restore the historical justice, open up the windows and increase the doorways. It was not a walk in the park, but it was done! The house and the apartment in particular has found their prior integrity.
The interior that was put together is a modern interpretation of an atmosphere of a tenement building of the past century with its characteristic features ingrained. It is originally an eclectic interior, at the junction of epochs. When doing the design, we addressed the expressive power of separate objects. Every item here is selected with purpose; a lot of vintage elements have their interesting story of where they came from and how they were made. Others, invented and made specifically for this project, add craftsmanship and uniqueness. Still others, new modern items, make the composition complete and invite into the present day. A refined casual esthetic is created, built on the dialog of the epochs within space. This is a modern house and at the same time a house full of memories and melancholy. This is a place to live and to fill the space with your own history.