The designers did not remodel the old apartment and left the rooms in their places. It turned out that the interior can be transformed using only decorative techniques.
Briefly
To refresh the interior of an ordinary Stalin building, the designers installed high doors and got rid of window sill blocks to let more light into the living room. In the decoration, they relied on English paints and natural wood floors. The final touch was colored furniture and decor.
Details
The customers bought a two-room apartment in a Stalin building for their student daughter and invited designers Andrei and Elena Uranov to create a stylish modern interior.
They immediately decided to leave the layout unchanged: an isolated kitchen, two rooms and a separate bathroom. But there was a major overhaul: all the non-load-bearing partitions were dismantled and reassembled from tongue-and-groove blocks, and the walls were covered with a new layer of plaster. The old ceilings and floors were also dismantled: the height of the ceiling was not only preserved, but also increased.
A long L-shaped corridor connects the exits from all rooms, and there is a small balcony. To install the double doors, the window sill blocks were dismantled. In other rooms, double-glazed windows were installed on the windows, and the window sills were made of quartz.
When decorating the walls, preference was given to paint. “The old stucco molding had to be removed and replaced with new plaster, but in the same style. We drew the stucco design in detail by hand,” say the designers.
The apron was tiled along the entire work surface. The gas pipe going down the wall to the stove was hidden in a removable box. It was tiled with tiles of the same shade, but smaller in size.
They laid an engineered board on the floor: for impregnation they used a coating that looks like oil, but is not inferior in strength to varnish. Italian tiles were used as flooring in the kitchen and hallway.
There are more than enough storage systems. For clothes, there was a spacious built-in wardrobe in the hallway, a wardrobe in the bedroom and a couple more wardrobes in the living room.
The washing machine was placed in a small bathroom: it was built into the console with shelves on top. The boiler was hidden in a technical cabinet – for quick access it was closed with wooden doors. Additional storage space for cosmetics and hygiene products has also been created here.
The kitchen set was installed in a corner, with traditional upper and lower cabinets. The niche under the window, left over from the old renovation, was closed with MDF doors: the result was a cold cabinet with a ventilation valve.
The future owner wanted to decorate the living room in cool colors: the designers added bright details in warm colors and armchairs with high rounded backs to the blue walls. All furniture, with the exception of a few mobile items, was created according to the designers’ sketches to suit the height of the ceiling in the apartment.
Instead of a bedroom, they installed an office with a sleeping area – this was also the wish of the customers’ daughter. A comfortable work area was important to her, and she doesn’t mind sleeping on the fold-out sofa.
Paintings were used as decor : two of them were painted by designer Elena Uranova, a couple more works were from the customer’s personal collection, and the rest of the paintings came from an art gallery. And, of course, there is a lot of textiles in the interior: decorative pillows, blankets, curtains were the finishing touch.