An apartment within a three-storey building, designed by Alexandros Tombazis in the 1970s, within one of the greenest residential districts at the northern suburbs of Athens, Greece, has been redesigned from scratch to provide contemporary housing to its new inhabitants: a family of four. The plan consists of a living room, an open kitchen, three bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, an ancillary space divided into a small storage and a laundry room and a guest WC. The main objective of the design was to create a warm atmosphere of unity within the available provided surface of approximately 170 square meters, by maintaining at the same time the maximum possible level of privacy within the bedrooms. 

An elongated corridor designed to let the daylight penetrate within the apartment from the south, connects the northeast veranda overlooking the creek with the high trees at the front, with the southwest patio at the back which has been transformed into a serene small garden with an olive tree and a sandpit designed for children’s play. A highly hierarchized intention was to maintain the building’s character from the 1970s –a solid concrete structure with high side openings reaching the ceiling– while at the same time to preserve some of its characteristic architectural elements such as the wooden rolling shutters made of solid wood and the railings made of steel at the patios. 

Natural stones and marble have been used for the bathrooms, the kitchen and the patios, natural oak for the flooring, the separative walls and most of the bespoke furnishing elements, along with black matte metal sheets for selected furnishing details. Everything from the kitchen counter and the dining table to the full-height bookcase located in the living room and from the beds to the closets, has been designed and custom-made in a bespoke manner exclusively for the apartment. 

Full-height wooden panels with insulation anchored on a hidden steel structure along the two sides of the corridor, function as the main separative walls/filters between the family residence’s common spaces and the more private life of its members. Preferred to a brick masonry structure in order to maximize the elongated corridor’s width, the separative wooden walls function also as receptors of the large amounts of wiring carefully integrated within their higher levels of their bodies and thus maintaining the maximum possible ceiling height throughout the residence.