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Making Space Where There Isn't Any
Apartment design presents a problem that villa design simply doesn't encounter.
In a villa, you have the luxury of dedicating entire rooms to specific purposes, of creating distinct character in separate spaces, of letting architecture breathe. In an apartment, everything gets compressed into a fraction of the space, and the typical solution involves accepting the limitation and working within it.
The question becomes how you create something that feels individual and purposeful when the walls are already decided, and the square footage is fixed.
Most interior work focuses on surface treatments.
New finishes, updated fixtures, contemporary furniture; which is essentially keeping the bones the same, but with a superficial makeover.
But there's another way to think about it.
Instead of accepting the apartment as a fixed container, treat every surface and every transition as an opportunity for something more deliberate. Take the conceptual wall in this particular Marina project, which we’re justifiably calling “Vivid Walls.” Curved wood and leather forming what reads as an opening, centered on a light fixture designed specifically for that moment; with the wall drawing your eyes up itself until you reach the opening. It's not dividing space so much as defining it, creating the perception of a threshold without actually building one.
The same principle applies throughout.
Kitchen, dining, and lounge areas occupy a single open space, but each reads as distinct; and the entire effect is achieved without a single physical partition. Yet, though those three areas are each sharing one open space, each is its own area, and the way we’ve achieved this is by the efficient use of concepts and accents.
The kitchen island, the sculptural shelving, the positioning of furniture create invisible boundaries that your mind recognizes even as your eye travels freely across the room.
Another workaround to the constrained space was the kitchen/ dining area, wherein the bespoke kitchen island was designed not only as a partition, but as a dining table that also happens to be a statement piece. This design choice allowed us to remove the need for a separate dining table entirely, while still making efficient use of the overall space.
The kitchen countertops work with the overall material language rather than against it. These aren't decorative choices (purely), but rather architectural ones, using texture and form to give each area its own identity.
Working within constraints often produces more interesting results than unlimited space ever does. When you can't simply add another room or expand the footprint, every decision carries more weight. The real work happens in how you handle transitions, how you use materials to create depth, and how you make walls mean something beyond their structural purpose.
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