AC Apartment, image courtesy Square ONE

In most of the interior refitting cases of a top floor apartment, the starting point is a compartmentalized space, and the result – an open space. However, in this case, the starting point was a penthouse with interior elevator, divided only by glass panels and curtains, obtaining two distinct apartments with shared exterior access to the staircase and the elevator. The penthouse was pragmatically restructured into four rooms and two bathrooms, plus storages and circulations.

AC Apartment - Layout plan, drawing courtesy Square ONE

The apartment is organized along the longitudinal axis of the generous circulations (1.5 meters width), flanked by storage areas on one side, and access doors to the rooms on the other. Except for the bed wall, the exterior closing of the living room and the matrimonial bedroom is made exclusively of glass, precisely of sliding panels, at the maximum dimension of the chosen system, so that the interior could open as much as possible to the terrace.

AC Apartment, image courtesy Square ONE

The three colors – white, black and brown – are regularly distributed according to surfaces and volumes. The supporting structure pillars are covered with mdf panels veneered with nut plywood, the same as a newly created interior area, a container meant to separate the daytime area from the night time one, which contains two rooms and a restroom. The merge of the panels was made by cutting the edges on a 45 degrees angle, so that the surfaces covered this way would offer the image of a one-piece, and not of a veneering with visible material thickness.

AC Apartment, image courtesy Square ONE

All the vertical elements – including the doors – have the free height between floor and ceiling (2.60 meters). The vertical structure elements are made of pieces with a strong horizontal dominant. The living-dining-kitchen area gravitates around a console – a white structure, four meters long, which serves as flower box, countertop (with storage space beneath) and dining area. Supported by the TV stand, a composition made of white and black rectangles built around a relatively central pillar of the living room, the console is a chromatic accent element, well outlined on the black modular structure of the kitchen furniture. In this structure, there was inserted, between the countertop and the kitchen’s hanged cabinets, a mirror that reflects in a pleasant way the window and the curtains on the opposite wall, elegantly cropping the black composition.

AC Apartment, image courtesy Square ONE

AC Apartment, image courtesy Square ONE

The matrimonial bedroom and the bathroom compose a conjoint space, being separated by a clear glass closing, doubled by a white curtain; this way, to the white volume in which is sculpted the washstand corresponds, at a formal level, the black volume of the console in front of the bed. The sanitary objects are, obviously, in rectangular shapes, in order not to alter the stringency of the right angle. The double washstand is like a topographic drawing, in the form of level curves which become wider and wider towards the top margin. The rectangular structure of the washstand penetrates the bathroom’s glass wall in order to allow placing, on its border, the light switch panel, which is as minimalist as the entire arrangement, with the switches indicated by blue LEDs.

AC Apartment, image courtesy Square ONE

At the detail level, the formal stringency of the omnipresent 90 degrees angle is sweetened only by the perfect circular lights placed on the ceiling and by a few organic graphic elements – the 2D black icon of a leafless tree which is symmetrically repeated against a vertical and, respectively, a horizontal axis, in the two bathrooms.

+ Project facts

Design: Square One
Team: Arh.Adrian Cancer, Arh.Ionel Pascu, Arh.Sabin Dumitriu, Arh.Andrei Nastase
Location: Bucharest, Romania

+ All images and drawings courtesy Square One