Αrchitect Natalia Bazaiou renovated a late ‘70’s apartment, originally dark and arranged into small spaces. It is now home to a family of four, with its remodelled interior meeting their needs for open green spaces and transparency, for a pervading spirit of playfulness and a relaxed sense of flow between the different uses of space; also, for the kind of planning that defies traditional limitations and space allocation trends.
Plants and trees are basic parameters of the family’s everyday life in the apartment as they are the focal point around which the plan develops. Constitutive elements of the identity of the Greek landscape, both natural and man-made, come into play to determine the organization, form and function of the apartment’s spaces: the sculptural simplicity of the design of space and volume; the emergence of vital open-air and semi-open-air areas as spaces to be lived in and experienced on an equal footing with the apartment’s indoor areas; the full exploitation of the connection and interplay between those spaces and an array of visual and functional tools and, as a result, the optimal use of natural light, whether direct or diffused, and of its range of hues, filtered through green zones and glass screens.
Ultimately, what has shaped the character and atmosphere of the apartment is the trust that has been placed in the textures of the different materials (which have been subjected to varying degrees of processing) and their intrinsic ‘truth’. Be it those that belonged to the old structure and were reworked into the fabric of the remodel or new ones, put together in situ, or others still, carrying stories and alive with the narratives of their use in previous contexts.
