Martin Skoček Peels Back a 1920s Bratislava Flat to Reveal Its Rondocubist Bones

Most apartment renovations in historic European centers face the same dilemma: honor the building or serve the family. Martin Skoček's renovation of Flat 29A in Bratislava refuses to choose. Situated in a rondocubist building designed by Klement Šilinger in the 1920s, the apartment was purchased in its original state, partitioned and dim, its structural ceilings buried under layers of plaster and neglect. Skoček's strategy was surgical: strip the flat back to its two-tract skeleton, cut deliberate openings in the central load-bearing wall, and let the revealed structure dictate the new spatial logic.

What makes the project genuinely compelling, and what earned it Czechia and Slovakia's CE ZA AR award for best interior, is the refusal to treat structure as decoration. The exposed wooden ceiling beams and reinforced concrete ribs are not cosmetic choices; they are the architecture. Everything Skoček adds, from Douglas fir flooring to flush oak doors, is calibrated to recede behind the original framework. The result is a home where history is not preserved under glass but lived in daily.

Structural Exposure as Spatial Strategy

The defining move here is legibility. By stripping the ceilings, Skoček recovered room height that had been lost to dropped plaster, and the alternating rhythm of timber beams and concrete ribs now reads clearly from one end of the apartment to the other. The stacked doorways punched through the central load-bearing wall create long axial views that align with the original windows on the façade, pulling daylight deep into the plan. These are not casual openings; each is precisely aligned to maintain the building's structural cadence while dissolving the claustrophobic segmentation of the original layout.

Walk through any of these portals and you feel the scale shift. The white plaster walls narrow to a threshold, the concrete beams overhead compress the frame, and then the next room opens. It is a sequence that borrows from the building's rondocubist DNA, where geometry and mass shape experience, not ornament.

Timber, Concrete, and the Art of Honest Junctions

The material palette is deliberately restrained: raw timber, poured concrete, white plaster, Douglas fir. What elevates the detailing is the way these materials meet. In the kitchen, flush-mounted appliances sit beneath timber beams that might be a century old, and pendant fixtures drop from the structural grid rather than from an arbitrary reflected ceiling plan. It is a room where every element answers to the structure above it.

One of the sharpest details appears at the staircase, where raw timber planking butts against white plaster at a clean vertical seam, and concrete stair treads emerge from the wall without a visible substructure. There is no trim, no transition strip, no apology. The junction is the detail. Skoček trusts his materials enough to let them end, and that confidence gives the interior a tautness that more elaborate finishes would have softened.

Living with Children in a Historic Shell

The double-height space with a timber mezzanine makes the ambition of the project tangible. Removing a portion of the floor slab to create vertical volume was not strictly necessary for function, but it transforms a standard apartment into something closer to a small house. Below, a child's play area benefits from the generous proportions; above, the mezzanine provides a loft-like sleeping or reading zone framed by the raw concrete ceiling.

The bedroom, by contrast, is deliberately compressed. Exposed concrete beams frame the doorway like a portal, and the interior relies on soft textures, a woven headboard and a thick wool rug, to counterbalance the structural honesty overhead. It is a careful modulation of warmth and rawness that avoids the two most common failures of industrial-chic renovations: feeling like a gallery or feeling like a construction site.

Quiet Rooms and Controlled Details

The bathroom demonstrates that Skoček's discipline holds even in service spaces. A gridded window above twin sinks admits filtered light, and a single spherical paper pendant provides the only soft element in an otherwise mineral room. There is no decorative tile pattern, no accent wall. The architecture is the accent.

Similarly, the hallway features flush oak veneer doors set into unbroken plaster planes. The hardware is concealed, the reveals are minimal, and the door surface reads almost as a panel of wall that happens to pivot. It is the kind of detail that only registers subconsciously: you notice the calm, not the mechanism. Across the apartment, this restraint accumulates into something larger than any individual gesture.

Why This Project Matters

Flat 29A matters because it proposes a rigorous alternative to the two dominant modes of heritage renovation: the museum approach, which freezes a building in amber, and the tabula rasa approach, which guts everything and starts over. Skoček does neither. He reads the existing structure as a design partner, letting the two-tract construction and its ceiling grid generate the new plan, the new proportions, and the new material logic. The result is an apartment that feels simultaneously rooted in the 1920s and entirely contemporary.

For architects working in historic European city centers, the lesson is pointed: the most powerful renovations are not the ones that add the most but the ones that reveal the most. Skoček's willingness to let Šilinger's structural logic lead, and to subordinate his own design vocabulary to it, produces a home with a coherence that purely new interiors rarely achieve. It is a project where subtraction is the primary creative act, and every exposed beam is proof that the building had something worth finding.

Flat 29A by Martin Skoček, located in a 1920s rondocubist building by Klement Šilinger on the border of Bratislava's Old Town, Slovakia. Photography by Matej Hakár.

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