The 90-square-metre apartment, which is set in an 1930’s residential building in Athens, belongs to a couple with a young child who asked the studio to transform it into a light and colorful space. Amalgama Architects decided to shun a colour palette drawn from the movies of Wes Anderson for the overhaul of this family home.
“They had some beautiful vintage pieces given to them by family and there were already some strong pieces of art that the couple had bought together – this helped to give us a strong idea of their style,” say the studio’s founders, Angeliki Avdi and Elina Mitsi. As the studio has quite a colourful portfolio of work, and in collaboration with the aesthetic of the owners who are super passionate about experimenting with design and colour, this project was no exception. Vivid colours have been applied throughout the apartment, having references to the color palette of Wes Anderson. The ground floor comprises an entrance hall that leads to the living room, the kitchen and the corridor to the most private spaces of the house. The walls of the hall were painted with a deep red which matched to the color of the terrazzo floor. The intense color pallet with the piano and the low lighting welcomes the user to the colorful universe. An old metallic door -that used to be there as the owner was a child- was restored and used as a divider in order to separate the dining room with the hall.
In the living room surfaces have been freshened up with a coat of white paint. As an area for communication -at the request of the clients- neither television nor projector was provided. The deep green terrazzo floor was restored and polished. Custom-designed furniture include an oak coffee table with an elliptic form and two side-curved pieces -metal and wood- where the music equipment is placed, as one of the owners is a musician with a large collection of vinyl records. The center piece of the dining room is a large wooden table and lime-green chairs. A floor to ceiling bookcase was designed especially for the space. In a second phase, by opening the sliding green doors, the dinning room connects with the kitchen. Milky orange cabinets and turquoise-blue walls and tile, a color sheme that brightens up the space and became a matter of choosing ingredients for a beautifully calibrated visual feast. Here, cupboards have been crafted from fluted panels of oakwood painted orange and finished with circular brass handles. Avoiding cold-shiny surfaces the studio transformed it to a comfortable space that the family spends most of their time in.
All the terrazzo floors -green, deep red and pale peaches- where restored and polished. In the bathrooms yellow, blue and dusty-orange colors clad the walls, matching with colorful tiles on the floor. The ambition [was] to balance the vigorous coloured accents and make the space brighter and airier while maintaining some rigour. The ceiling in all the bedrooms was colored same as the wardrobes. Throughout the apartment, green skirting board forms a colored ‘ribbon’ around the lower half of the walls, creating a playful interplay with the terrazzo-marble floors and the wall colors.
