Our acquaintance with the apartment in Krakow’s former Jewish district began long before its owners came to our studio asking for an interior design.

We knew this apartment, and in fact one particular frame, very well. The previous owners had an impressive library, reaching almost 4 meters high ceiling, visible from street level, which was our daily way home. Secretly peeking towards the window, we fantasized about what the rest of the apartment looked like. Imagine our surprise when a few years later it turned out that we could not only satisfy our curiosity, but also arrange the whole apartment from the scratch.

There was no great surprise – the apartment, just like the tenement house and the entire neighbourhood in which it is located, had an amazing atmosphere. Having such a design base, our starting point for working on this space was the old rule “Primum non nocere” or “First do no harm”.

The most difficult design task we faced was to open the rather tight and dark space of the day zone and to let the proper amount of daylight in. Removing the wall between the living room and the kitchen turned out to be insufficient, there was still a feeling of tightness. So we proposed to make an additional opening between the living room and the bedroom in the place of the wall niche where the heating stove used to be. In order to avoid a direct entrance from the living room to the bedroom, we offset the wall creating an additional corridor, which accommodated new functions such as home office, a pantry and wardrobe. This decision made possible an optically connection of the living room space with the rest of the apartment and more importantly allowed the daylight to fill the whole space.

In order to separate the entrance hall from the rest of the apartment, without depriving the living area of the exceptionally picturesque daylight, gently filtered through the leaves of the trees, we proposed a glass and steel wall, loosely referring to the mullions’ divisions of the historic woodwork of tenement verandas.

The most characteristic formal element of the interior are two wall openings topped with arches. The form that we gave to new openings turned out to be right architectural intuition, because during construction works original brick vaults were discovered in these places.

The materials used in the project, such as oak parquet arranged in a herringbone pattern or a double-leaf white door, refer to the classic, 19th century interior. A counterbalance for the classic elements is the colour, sometimes pastel and delicate, sometimes intense and deep, like burgundy of the bespoke sideboard or ultramarine in the entrance niche. One of the most eye-catching colours, however, is the gold of the brass kitchen fronts. The owners, extremely determined to implement the project as faithfully as possible, ordered them to be made in the remote region of Bieszczady Mountains, and then refined them themselves, testing various methods of aging brass. The involvement of the owners was an important part of the entire design process: their sensitivity was extremely valuable at the conceptual stage, and their determination allowed to turn the concepts into reality.