Apartment in old Ljubljana

Project description:The architect’s hidden ambition is that he could gradually, according to his own beliefs, first build one building, then a whole neighbourhood around it, followed by the planning of the city, which would expand into the cultural landscape… Jože Plečnik claimed that architecture is present everywhere, from the front door handle to the urban plan of the city. But on the other hand, it is right that projects have their limits, physical, intellectual, conceptual and financial. But not everything always goes as planned.

With the client of a small apartment in 2. on the first floor of an apartment house on the waterfront of old Ljubljana, we met for the first time with the intention of simply furnishing her existing 42m² apartment, which stretches as a slender sequence of spaces from the Ljubljanica River to the New Market Square. But very soon it became clear that the roof had to be renovated first, then the mezzanine structure, then the plumbing, then the staircase, and finally the joinery – for the investment in the interior to make any sense at all. A small task turned into a serious investment, but in the end it was a great success.

By designing a central multifunctional cabinet, we have created a connecting axis that optically links and functionally unites the two key rooms in the apartment, the kitchen with the dining room and the bedroom with the working/living area. The series is intersected by a series of gaps in which we insert important pieces of antique furniture to which the client has a special relationship. The relationship between the anonymous, almost hygienic whiteness and the voids accentuated by the floral pattern reinterprets the juxtaposition of history and modernity, the speed and anonymity of everyday life, with the depth, plasticity and texture that memories and experiences leave in us.

The apartment is unique in that, due to its small size, the bed can be stowed under the slightly elevated bathroom. This changes the character of the bedroom into a living room. Similarly, turning the dining table turns the kitchen into a dining room.

Authors of the project BLENKUŠ Matej, CIMPERMAN Katja, CVETREŽNIK Anja