alto design studio Builds a Slovenian House Interior Around a Basement Games Room and a Cobalt Tiled Hearth

Most domestic interiors that call themselves playful stop at a single feature wall or a novelty light. The Fun House, a 240 m² interior in Slovenia by Ljubljana practice alto design studio, led by Nina Eminagic and Mirza Eminagic, goes further. The clients came to the studio open to bold choices and asking for a lounge or game room, and the project earned its name from that first conversation. What followed is a three-level house where colour, pattern and material shifts do real organisational work.

What interests us is the discipline underneath the fun. Every saturated move is tied to a function or a threshold: a cobalt tiled mass marks the hearth, red steel marks where food is prepared, a pale olive stair carries you between floors, and a teal plywood box contains the basement games room. The result reads less like a showroom of colour and more like a legible house where you always know which room you are in and what it is for.

A Cobalt Hearth Anchors the Ground Floor

The open living space is organised around a fireplace volume clad entirely in cobalt glazed tile. It is the heaviest object on the ground floor, and the studio treats it as a piece of furniture rather than architecture: a bench wraps its base, and rounded bullnose trim softens every edge you might sit on or brush past.

The white grout grid matters here. It keeps the blue from becoming a flat block of colour and gives the volume a measurable scale against the red-edged kitchen island and the yellow stepped stair nearby. Three primary-coloured elements share one room, yet each stays distinct because each is a different material.

Dining and Lounging Beside the Garden

Around the hearth, the plan loosens into a sequence of small settings. A round black dining table sits under a white cone pendant with glazed doors opening to the garden, and a split-top table with mismatched maroon and blue chairs repeats the idea at a second corner. The cone pendants act as anchors in an otherwise open floor, defining places without walls.

The seating corner is quieter: a blue sofa, a tan quilted armchair and a cloud-shaped pendant beside a sheer curtain and a window onto trees. The project credits list fabric among its materials, and you can see why. Textiles do much of the softening work against hard tile and steel.

A Stainless Kitchen with a Red Heart

The kitchen is the most technical space in the house and the studio lets it look that way. Stainless steel cabinetry gives a professional, wipe-clean baseline, then a red island and a veined marble splashback push back against it. A linear pendant hung from a bright blue cord is a small gesture, but it shows the attitude: even the cable is allowed to be a colour.

The floating shelf of plates, the blue glass vase and the red enamel pot are styling, but they also confirm that the palette is meant to absorb everyday objects. A kitchen like this does not need to be cleared to look right.

Red Accents at the Scale of the Hand

At the entry, an alcove of open shelving, hanging jackets, cork stools and a red mirror sits on a red and white checkered floor. It is a mudroom treated as a welcome, and the checkerboard returns later in the basement rug and the shower floor, tying the levels together.

Smaller details carry the same red through the house: pink tubular table legs with black feet, a tilting stool, a red vanity and red wall-mounted tap in the ground floor bathroom. These are moments you touch daily, and placing the strongest colour there is a smart move. The fun is felt in use, not only seen from a doorway.

The Stair as a Colour Transition

The stair is where the house changes key. Pale olive treads turn through a white stairwell beside a ribbed translucent polycarbonate panel, a low-cost industrial material used here to borrow daylight and blur views between levels. Seen from below, the treads become a stack of colour floating against the screen.

Lower down, a teal translucent glass panel sits over a dark striped timber floor, previewing the basement palette before you arrive. We like that the circulation is not a neutral pause between colourful rooms; it is a gradient that prepares you for what comes next.

Under the Concrete Roof

Upstairs, the mood turns calm. The bedroom places white floor mattresses on tatami mats below a staggered white panel headboard, with a raw concrete sloping ceiling left exposed above. The low sleeping height makes the room feel taller and lets the roof structure read clearly.

The upper bathroom keeps the same raw ceiling but adds a printed cloud sky across the basin wall, a blue wall tap and a yellow looped towel radiator beside a black and white checked shower floor. It is the most literal gesture in the house, and also the most child-friendly, which suits a floor organised around bedrooms.

A Basement Games Room Wrapped in Teal

The brief's central request lands in the basement. A pool table with lilac felt sits on a red and cream checkered rug over a bright blue floor, and teal wood-panelled walls wrap the whole room in a single colour. Below ground, without views out, that continuous envelope gives the space its own identity rather than leaving it as a leftover lower level.

A teal ledge holds a decanter and metal cups above bar stools, so the room works for adults in the evening as well as for play during the day. This is the move that justifies the project's name: a basement that people will actually choose to spend time in.

Stripes, Curtains and Display

Around the pool table, the studio layers stripes at several scales. Floor-length curtains alternate pale grey and teal, a red and pale blue striped bench displays brick-built toy cars and a walker model, and a striped dark floor runs under a black lounge chair and teal shelving lit by paper pendants.

The display bench is a telling detail. It treats the family's collections as part of the interior rather than clutter to be stored away, which is exactly how a games room should behave.

Plans and Drawings

The plans confirm the vertical logic. The basement holds the large game room along with three storage rooms, a utility room and a heating room off a central hallway. The ground floor groups the entrance hall, bathroom, living room and kitchen with its round dining table along a terrace. The upper floor arranges bedrooms, a bathroom and two home offices around a central hallway with a reading space, ending in a terrace.

Read together, the three plans show a house split into social, private and recreational strata, with the stair as the single spine. Colour then reinforces a zoning that is already clear in plan.

Why This Project Matters

Bold interiors often fail because colour is applied as a finish, disconnected from how a house is used. The Fun House shows another route: assign each strong colour to a material and a function, then let the plan do the rest. Cobalt tile means hearth, red steel means cooking, olive means movement, teal means play. That mapping is why the house feels coherent despite its range.

It is also a useful reminder that a game room can be a design driver rather than an afterthought. By giving the basement the most complete spatial treatment in the house, alto design studio turns the least valued level into its most memorable one. For anyone designing family homes, that reversal is worth studying.

The Fun House by alto design studio (Nina Eminagic, Mirza Eminagic), Slovenia. Area: 240 m². Completed 2026. Photography by Ana Skobe.

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