Modern yet Nostalgic

Situated at the historical center of Saint-Petersburg, NOMESSPROCESS studio has transformed communal apartment into an apartment hotel Sands Rooms.

The seven-rooms apartment near Nevsky Avenue in the Reibstein's revenue house built in 1912 became the main inspiration for architects and their clients.

From an apartment, each room of which belonged to different families for a century, it was turned to 4 separate rooms with a common lobby with an entrance through the historic hall with a fireplace and 1 threerooms apartment with its own entrance through the traditional for St. Petersburg courtyard-well. The client’s technical requirements described the general issue for each room: the availability of personal units of bathrooms and mini-kitchens. A key added design element was created from these blocks which were interpreted differently to built into the scenario of every room.

The rethinking of the space was hold with the preservation and careful restoration of the original historical interior details. Wooden windows and doors were cleared of several layers of paint to return them their natural color. Their geometry and existing fittings was restored and debugged while the missing elements were selected from analogues from the flea markets suitable for the time period.

Old pieces of furniture and last century mode of life (canapé, sideboards, books) were leftovers of former owners in some rooms. Almost all these elements were integrated into the new design. NOMESSPROCESS did not have the purpose of turning the hotel into a museum of antiquity but the project was conceived as a kind of bridge between the man of XXI century and the rich architectural history of Saint-Petersburg. At the time of working on the project there were no minihotels in the city initiated by the complete restoration of all historical elements with the opportunity to comfortably plunge into the details of the past even during a short stay in the room.

Address: Konnaya St. 8 - Saint-Petersburg, Russia