CGD

This apartment designed by Facha architekti definitely deserves an award for great imagination, as the color scheme, furniture shapes and overall spatial ordering were approached in a truly imaginative fashion. The apartment features items that are over a century old as well as wholly modern features, and looking through each door is like looking into a painting.

It all started with a 19th-century apartment house in Prague’s old town that had been inherited by the family – it was large, full of furniture and many rooms of indeterminate use. “During our first visit, the space was covered in layers of carpet, wallpaper and dusty curtains. We moved through narrow paths between the fitted furniture that included a kitchen from the early 1920s and Jiří Jiroutek’s cabinets from the 1960s along with IKEA chairs,” says Andrea Sobotková, head designer of this project by Facha architekti, about her first visit to the space.

The apartment had to be moved out and rationally organized. This process yielded a three-room flat and a studio apartment with its own facilities and a sleeping mezzanine – considering the ceiling height of 3.6 meters, this was a logical solution. Every piece of furniture suddenly had its place and function.

New furniture and appliances also had a lot to do with this. The walk-through living room features a sectional sofa which gives the space room to move while remaining functional. The kitchen now has a bar that segues into the kitchen table. But the most striking thing consists of remaking new furniture from the old, as the best cabinets and commodes that were found in the apartment were joined with a steel rack structure. The resulting space becomes a furniture collage with a story.

The flat clearly shows that Andrea Sobotková was educated as an artist (she graduated from the Intermedia studio at the Academy of Fine Arts). She came to Facha architekti five years ago and her colleagues Matěj Nepustil, Martin Chlanda and Jana Fischerová gave her an architectural “crash course”. Since then, Andrea has been coming up with some of the most unusual and creative solutions.

Such original artistic language is, however, quite typical for all work done by Facha architekti. This young studio has so far completed a few projects, mostly renovations and new projects of family housing. But all of them share an emphasis on the beauty of materials, colors and details. The studio does much of this work in-house, so that the outcome truly reflects their original ideas. They work with various concepts, wood and concrete, always bringing along their tool of choice – imagination.

Karolína Vránková