SKRIZ` LITA: Compact Lviv Housing Woven from Ukrainian Embroidery and Reclaimed Materials

What happens when you thread a national embroidery pattern through a concrete wall and use it to cast light across a bedroom? You get a perforated screen that turns sunlight into ornament, a detail that captures the entire ambition of SKRIZ` LITA [Through the Years]. Set in the cultural heart of Lviv, Ukraine, the project refuses to treat compact urban housing as a problem of square meters. Instead, it treats it as a problem of belonging: how do you fit three generations under one roof without sacrificing privacy, daylight, or cultural identity?

Designed by Вікторія Альошина and Олександр Левицький, the project earned Runner-up honors in the Nano Nest 2020 competition on UNI. The brief called for inventive approaches to micro-dwelling, and the designers responded by grounding their proposal in something larger than spatial efficiency: the tradition of the "Ukrainian House," a domestic typology built around extended family life. The result is a compact home that draws on thatched roofing, whitewashed walls, wooden construction, and reclaimed materials sourced from old Ukrainian houses in the Lviv region, all reinterpreted for a contemporary urban lot.

Embroidery as Environmental Filter

The bedroom image tells you everything about how this project handles cultural reference. A perforated screen, its cutout pattern derived from traditional Lviv-region embroidery, sits between the window and the sleeping space. Sunlight passes through and casts leaf-shaped shadows across white bedding and bare concrete walls. The motif is not decorative appliqué; it is a functional layer that modulates light, privacy, and airflow. The designers treat Ukrainian heritage as a performance material rather than a surface treatment.

The sectional drawing reveals the project's spatial logic: two mirrored dwelling units, each rising through multiple floors, packed with interior furnishings across stacked half-levels. By mirroring the units, the designers double the density of the plot while giving each family its own vertical sequence from ground-floor communal space to upper-floor private rooms. The section also shows how natural light is pulled deep into the plan through generous glazing at multiple levels.

A Living Room That Works Harder Than Its Footprint

The open-plan living area compresses kitchen, dining, circulation, and workspace into a single volume organized around a floating staircase and a white kitchen island. Concrete floors anchor the room visually while panoramic windows push the perimeter outward with daylight. The staircase doubles as a spatial divider, separating cooking from sitting without closing off sightlines. Every room in the house contains a workspace of some kind, an acknowledgment that modern domestic life cannot be neatly zoned into "work" and "rest."

Step into the kitchen zone and the material palette shifts. Timber cabinetry with an integrated sink meets glazed doors that open directly onto a planted courtyard. The courtyard acts as a climate buffer, relevant in Lviv's distinct seasonal swings, letting warm-season cooking spill outdoors while the glazing traps solar gain during colder months. Traditional whitewashed surfaces appear alongside modern insulation layers, a quiet illustration of the project's sustainable strategy: use what the region already knows, then upgrade its thermal performance.

Thresholds Layered with Timber and Concrete

The entry corridor stacks three functions into one passage: bicycle storage slots between concrete columns, a perforated timber screen with organic cutout patterns controls visual access from the street, and overhead lighting washes the texture of reclaimed wood. It is a threshold that does the cultural work of a front porch and the practical work of a mudroom without consuming extra floor area. The organic cutouts echo the embroidery screens found elsewhere in the house, giving the facade a consistent ornamental language that reads clearly from outside.

Upstairs, a raised sleeping platform demonstrates the project's commitment to volumetric efficiency. Integrated storage stairs lead to the bed level, eliminating the need for a separate wardrobe or closet. A window at platform height frames a view to the exterior courtyard, ensuring the compressed sleeping zone never feels subterranean. Play areas and quiet reading corners occupy the leftover geometries beneath and beside the platform, giving children and adults their own territories within the same room.

Loft Living with Every Centimeter Assigned

A top-down view of the compact loft interior reveals the final move: a steel staircase connects to a light-wood desk built into the wall, surrounded by shelving and storage that fills every vertical surface. The furniture is not placed in the room; it is the room. Built-in elements eliminate dead corners and wasted floor area, turning even the smallest upper level into a functional workspace or study. The material choice of light wood against steel keeps the visual weight low, preventing the tight volume from feeling oppressive.

Why This Project Matters

SKRIZ` LITA makes a case that cultural preservation and spatial compression are not opposing forces. By sourcing materials from demolished Ukrainian houses, reinterpreting regional embroidery as light-filtering screens, and organizing the plan around multigenerational cohabitation, the project turns constraint into a design thesis. It argues that the Ukrainian House typology can survive urbanization if designers are willing to stack, mirror, and integrate its principles rather than simply miniaturize them.

For heritage-rich cities facing housing pressure, the lesson is concrete: sustainable materials, reclaimed elements, and cultural motifs are not nostalgic luxuries. They are structural advantages. They reduce embodied energy, create recognizable identity on tight urban lots, and offer residents a sense of continuity that generic micro-apartments cannot. Альошина and Левицький have demonstrated that even at the nano scale, architecture can carry the full weight of a tradition.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Вікторія Альошина, Олександр Левицький

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Project credits: SKRIZ` LITA [Through the Years by Вікторія Альошина, Олександр Левицький Nano Nest 2020 (uni.xyz).