The two-levelled apartment occupies the top and the attic floors of a building, constructed in the beginning of last century in the eclectic style. The aim was to maintain the same historical style inside the premises.
I first visited this apartment when I was a student back in 1988. It was an awful smelly apartment shared by different families. The roof was falling, it was hard to do the measurements, as I had to blocks my noise with one hand to avoid the stink. Notwithstanding that awful sight, I was fascinated the charming ceiling modelling, the spaciousness of the place and the architecture of the outside of the building. After meeting the client and the apartment, there were years of discussions and negotiations, as we decided to refurbish the building and extend it with the attic. I was not earlier than 2008 when we got the permission to reconstruct, and started knocking down the inner walls. A few years prior to that we took all the measurements, we put down the remaining imaged on the paper and , and took casts of the remaining decoration.
While it was the period of preparations I was showing the premises to many foremen, the experienced ones refused to work straight away, saying that this job was not possible to execute, everything was uneven, no straight corners an so on. My friends architects were saying that if I started this it would be a pain in the neck, and the result will never be satisfactory. Having listened to all that I was determined to do the job whatever it would cost me, and it cost me a lot at the end. Five building companies in succession took part in the construction, a new foreman every 6 month, the modelling was not completed, none managed at the beginning, So all in all the project lasted 10 years, 120 years of fights, wars, disputes, and I am the only one to have been there from the beginning to the end, so I won..... And its only now that I see the result, I realise that it was WORTH IT !
LI V I NG ROOM The first thing you see in this apartments is the huge space, and the size of this space is very charming. Everybody who visits it for the first time does the same old thing: he enters the house, goes upstairs, opens the door and freezes for a second. I did it myself a few timesand I know the feeling, it is because you expect to see an apartment, but what you really see is a palace! I aimed to have this effect, after the reconstruction the ceiling became significantly higher — 4.2 metres.
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T H E S TA I R S It was hard work to design the stairs, It was essential for he height of each step to be comfortable, but not to make a long sausage out of the stairs at the same time. That is why the beginning and the end of the stairs are made as part of a helix, which allowed to make the desired number of steps without extending the length of the construction.
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DESIG N I NG I order to rebuild the premises we took casts and made the needed measurements and drafts. Though we needed to make new molds to create the design on the new walls and ceilings.
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FLOOR I NG Marble is a special topic of this apartment. the living room and hall flooring is made of solid pieces of Indian marble, the average dimensions of such a stone are 3x3m. It took us ages to chose the right type of marble, many of them tended to look primitive in the apartment, a month later we were offered this light green marble, and we fell in love with it. So amazing it was! It served us for the living room, hall, and the stairs.
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FI R EPL ACE The fireplace is of great sentimental value, it looks so appropriate in this apartment. — Did it use to be here? — No, it wasn’t here originally! The fireplace is executed in three types of marble- white, pink and yellow ones, it really looks antique — as if it has been there for a hundred years.
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DOOR S As many other items in the apartment the doors were executed according to an individual blueprints. There was a major problem when redesigning the space as all the apertures had different dimensions and were in a chaotic order, so we had to remove the apertures and place them in axis according to the rules of classic interiors, which was not a easy task, due to some of the walls being up to 70 sm wide. So we had to produce our own metal bearing structures. The doors themselves are made of solid wood. It was a special task to make the raised fanlights. We were choosing from among many gravers in order to find the hand that could produce the carving in the right style, without hints of Ukrainian «Barocco».
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HOOK A H ROOM We so called this room as the ceiling design was in Neo Moorish style, which defined the name and guided to choose the colours. It was hard to gather a lovely bunch out of those multiple colours. It took us about two weeks to chose the right colours and design. It was hard work but the result is worth it! The walls are painted in the «chameleon» technique, the walls are shimmering changing colour from wine colour to dark green, which completes the picture and conforms with the marble of the same shade. The flooring is made of four solid tiles of marble, and so we had the mirror effect in the centre of the room. We needed to order 4 chunks cut off the same piece of stone in order to have the same pattern on each of them.
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GU ES T T OI LE TS The most difficult bit was to install the wall marble panels. All the walls in this premises are made of solid pieces of marble, which are up to 3х4 metres. Not a single seem on the walls! The touching element in this room is the sink executed in the stainless steel incusing technique.
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название объекта: Эклектика функциональное назначение: жилой дом местонахождение: Киев, ул. Прорезная автор: Завгороднева Валерия площадь: 600 м2 фото: Эдуард Стэльмах, Юбик Литвин
Эклектизм, от греч. ekiektiko’s — способный выбирать, выбирающий. Сочетание разных стилей или взглядов, основанное на их искусственном соединении.
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Архитектурная мастерская futurum-fractal +38 (044) 209 12 04 http://futurum-fractal.com futurum.fractal@gmail.com