Apartment in Bucharest; TAG Architecture; Monica Despina Sache│BIG SEE Awards 2018

The project, located in a street bound apartment of a quiet neighbourhood of central Bucharest, rearranges the interior architecture of a post-communist building flat into a light, airy home of a family of three, it’s mainly northern orientation offering the additional challenge of providing sufficient natural light to an otherwise generous space.

The demarcation between different functions is not stiff and restricting, the spaces are not closed off in “isolated rooms” but rather spaces that have permeable limits that combine and continue in a succession of natural use; the living room and bedrooms become focal points that arrange related spaces around them in a hierarchy of intimacy levels.

The spaces are permeable, the kitchen and living room in direct communication while the working space continues the dining room that is adjacent to the living room. The same rule continues visually, the working space being separate but not isolated, the dividing glass surface providing participation as well as separation when quiet is needed. In the bathrooms the matte, opaque glass offers space for natural light to enter. Fluid limits, glass surfaces and a luminous chromatic bring the light to the interior, the apartment becoming a quiet island detached from the urban noise.

Material wise, the spaces are clothed in pure, simple surfaces, without artifice or pretentiousness, sustaining the functions, lighting and acoustics; the apparent concrete ceiling, the slate flooring and glass in the living room; cut and volumetric travertine, ample mirrored surfaces and translucent glass in the bathrooms; the white and soft floors, simple, dense and translucent curtains and the warm wood in the bedrooms.