Soggiorno e zona pranzo open space con un divano grigio al centro

Our period sets its style each day. Our eyes, unfortunately, do not know how to perceive it yet

Le Corbusier

An apartment in the central area of ​​Palermo for a couple with a beautiful little girl. They have always lived in that area and decided to buy a seventies apartment with the aim of a radical renovation.
The development in plan is the typical one: straight corridor that disengages the rooms, arranged both on the right and on the left, and bathroom at the end of the corridor.

The desire is for a large living room at the entrance, preferably equipped with a wardrobe, dining area, comfortable kitchen overlooking the dining area.
The guys are young but have some furnishings that must find a place in the project. Absolute priority: a kitchen with central island!

 

The project

There are two ways to deal with the problem: draw the line of least conflict by producing a standard result, or try to transform the alleged critical issues into opportunities by maximizing the final result.

Leonardo Cavalli

The distribution was partly conditioned by the presence of the corridor, inevitable for the rooms on the right and on the left. Solving this was the first point of the project and it was solved with great satisfaction by the clients, both adults and youngest.

While remaining located in the same place, with a few transformations it has become the “tunnel” to reach rooms and services. The creation of many pieces of wall, staggered and rotated, misaligned and slightly skewed, has allowed the preparation of a series of cracks, deep and clearly visible even with the lights off, which, with the help of invisible LED strip lighting as inserted inside the slots, it splits the entire corridor which from a simple elongated rectangle becomes an experience to reach the rooms of the house.

Long corridor with wooden flooring and a white table resting on the corner wall

The renovation involved everything: partition walls, systems, floors, claddings, doors and external fixtures.
Everything was chosen by the boys who, with very clear ideas, started from the oak wood floor in an intense gray tone.

Even the one under the floor played an important role in the combination of “desire and design”: the desire for a warm and comfortable home satisfied by the design of a radiant floor system.

Only the kitchen area, the bathrooms and the laundry room have been excluded from the wooden floor. For the kitchen and the laundry a black colour 90×90 flooring. For bathrooms, matching floors and walls.

Kitchen with an island in the center and three white stools on one side

For the bathrooms, two, very similar solutions but with different shades. For the couple, porcelain stoneware in 60×120 slabs in shades of beige, with a wooden bathroom cabinet with marble processing and double sink.

For the girl’s bathroom, a unique gray tone but with a fun solution for the lighting of sanitary fixtures, just to not go wrong in the dark!

Two sanitary fixtures lit by two wall lights located just above

The lighting, almost everywhere, is delegated to the LEDs hidden in the false ceiling, for a diffused light reflected from the ceiling and walls with fewer accents due to the presence of table lamps, floor lamps and suspensions on the kitchen surface.

Furnishings

Even the best designers produce successful products only if their designs solve the right problems. A wonderful interface to the wrong features will fail.

Jakob Nielsen

The space is delimited by the empty, white, very bright volume in which reposition the existing furnishings and organize the newly purchased ones.
One of them is the wardrobe closet at the entrance: an IKEA Pax module perfectly integrated into the wall which valued just over a dinner for four; it has very well satisfied the “desires” of the wardrobe for coats and overcoats of owners and guests.

Living room with sofa and wall bookcase that leads to the entrance

The furnishings of the dining area have been repositioned while the sofa and the wall equipped with bookcase and TV have been purchased from scratch, in tone with the gray oak floor, an element that unites the whole apartment.

Square table with 4 chairs around a dining room integrated in an open space with the living room

 

Design and budget

I hardly turn to craftsmen for the realization of the furnishings even when it comes to tailor-made solutions. I have always preferred to rely on specialized industrialized companies, able to satisfy even the most complex needs so as not to lose the advantages that sometimes have in the management of the time of realization, supply and installation of what is needed inside an apartment.

If on the one hand this can limit expressive abilities, on the other it reduces decision-making, implementation and installation times as well as an often economic advantage, allowing to remain within the budget provided by the client, another wish expressed for the predisposition of the project.

Even the very young girl’s room has been decorated  with furnishings purchased from furniture retailers and the shelves are also IKEA’s, because the space between the two walls has been left “ad hoc” for their insertion.

White kitchen island with glasses and a bonsai resting on it

Precisely on the line of budget containment, the design of the kitchen space originated from the furnishings. The desire was to be able to purchase a display product, in order to keep costs down. The project fulfilled the desire. We started from the size of the furnishings and built walls and plasterboard to contain the kitchen chosen by the boys “at the showroom of a dear friend of them”.

Moreover, the furniture was perfect: a linear part for the hob and sink, the columns for ovens, fridge and pantry and the island, perfectly inserted in the center of the available space. A real luck!

White double bed with some black buildings on the sides

Even for the bedroom, the desire was to reposition the furnishings already present in the other apartment. For the bedroom this is hardly a problem, given the standard dimensions of the bed and the three usual accessories: two bedside tables and a chest of drawers.

And in fact no difficulty for the project which was completed with a full-height storage cabinet.
All interior doors are almost invisible. Along the white walls the doors are flush with the wall with a matt white lacquered finish, almost as if the walls themselves rotate to allow entry into the rooms.

Long white corridor with various white doors on the sides and a wooden floor

A cozy and warm apartment despite the monochrome of white, with a project that allowed the reuse of the furnishings owned by the clients without polluting the spirit of the intervention, which aimed at the total renovation of an apartment already dated and unsuitable for the desire for a modern, cheerful, young and functional home.

 

Design and construction supervision: Architetto Giuseppe Rappa
Executing company: Impresa Edile Giuseppe Scalici
Supplies Floors – Fixtures Coatings – Sanitary – Installations – Lighting: Cascino Angelo & C. S.n.c.
Furnishings: Inedito Santomauro
Pictures: Giuseppe Rappa