INDIFFERENCE CURVES
Apartment, Athens
The living room in front of the bathroom curve
The dining room located between the two curves
The kitchen curve
The new load-bearing structure, the kitchen, the new window and the dining space
The kitchen inside and out
The bathroom curve
The small bedroom inside and out
The bathroom
3d rendering of the bathroom curve
3d rendering of the kitchen curve
Built-in desk and bookshelves in the master bedroom
Plan before and after
Sketch of the proposal during the demolition works
*In economics, an indifference curve is the locus of points showing different combinations of two goods providing equal satisfaction to the consumer. Indifference curves do not intersect.
Two such “indifference curves” were all it took to radically reconfigure the claustrophobic ground floor apartment in Alimos. One of them enfolded the kitchen and entrance, while the other enveloped the bathroom. The living room and the dining area float in the in-between space.
And just like that, everything swapped places and the back yard became the front of the apartment: The entrance/hall was transformed into an office, the dining room into a bedroom, the kitchen into a living room and the bedroom into a kitchen.
We tackled one of the main issues, which was the lack of natural light, by extensively reworking almost all the openings: enlarging existing windows, adding new ones and introducing a new balcony door which overlooks the back yard. We also performed a trick where interior walls were lowered and framed with glass so that the light from above would diffuse unobstructed all around the apartment. The result was indeed impressive. Once completely demolished, the interior became a canvas on which we freely composed geometries, textures and color combinations. Each design gesture was marked with a characteristic material and color: All new metal structures, where load-bearing walls were removed, were coated in bright yellow, curved surfaces were lined with green wooden semicircular strips, the bathroom interior was painted in pink and violet tones and white marble was used for all countertops. The private areas of the apartment (bedroom-office) were raised on a wooden platform, while for the rest we opted for monochrome and terrazzo handmade cement tiles, reminiscent of the apartment’s past.
Our client, a young man with a peculiar taste for “old-fashioned” materials combined with bold contemporary elements, acted as a trigger for our daring design choices and gave us the opportunity to see our canvas come to life in three dimensions.
