AB Apartment

This ground floor apartment was designed as a personal sanctuary for a couple who are both designers. The two bedroom apartment unfolds as a sequence of distinct, intimate rooms rather than an open-plan gesture, built around a shared instinct for contemplation and a love for social connection, holding space for quiet mornings and evenings spent entertaining friends.

An angled entrance leads into the dining room, anchored by a custom travertine table and solid wood chairs, its ceiling painted a deep red that envelops the space, imparting a warmth for long dinners with friends. A Flos Taraxacum pendant hangs above the dining table, entering the space. At the side, a dry kitchen counter lined in Mutina Punto tiles keeps things easy for hosting.

Passing through a framed threshold, the mood shifts. The living room is conceived as a modernist wooden box, walls and ceiling wrapped in oak veneer, furnished with a custom sofa, armchair and rug made to the owners' own specifications. A door to the master bedroom is concealed within the panelling, keeping the room's lines uninterrupted. Beyond it, the bedroom turns light and airy, with a custom bedhead in burl wood veneer and a full height window looking out to the landscaped exterior.

The owners' own paintings and ceramics are situated throughout, sitting alongside objects collected on their travels, so the apartment reads less as a completed and finished interior than a vessel for the accumulation of a shared life.

Lighting was treated as its own design layer throughout, drawn from multiple sources in each room to create pockets of brightness and dimness that shift the atmosphere across the day. The two bathrooms carry through material language of the other rooms in different ways, the common bathroom in deep red Japanese tile and red marble, echoing the dining room's warmth, and the master bathroom in a quieter, soft beige travertine.