Georgios Apostolopoulos Architects Strips a 1970s Kifisia Apartment and Rebuilds Its Rooms Out of Joinery

Most apartment renovations start by deciding where the new walls go. Georgios Apostolopoulos Architects started by deciding where none should go. In Kifisia, the leafy northern suburb of Athens known for its large mansions, the studio took an 80 m² unit inside a circular 1970s modernist block and removed every internal partition. The flat had once been a psychiatrist's office and had fallen into disrepair. What remained after demolition was the building's own geometry: a curved plan, a long arc of balcony, and daylight that could finally cross the whole floor.

The interesting part is what came back in. The rooms were not rebuilt as rooms. They were rebuilt as furniture. Floor-to-ceiling joinery now does the work that drywall used to do, and it adds things a wall cannot: a pocket door, a fold-down bed, a pop-out desk, wardrobes that act as filters, and mirrored panels that hide the shower and WC. Privacy becomes a setting you choose. When the cabinetry is closed, the bedroom effectively disappears. We think this is a sharper argument about domestic space than another open-plan loft, because it keeps the option of enclosure and simply moves it into the hands of the occupant.

A Landmark Block with a Curve Built In

The building is the reason this apartment could never be a box. Its rounded towers, tiered balconies and striped awnings belong to a strand of Athenian modernism that treated the residential block as a sculptural object, and the ribbed concrete canopy at ground level shows how much structural ambition went into a housing project. Wallpaper has called it a landmark, and the street views make the case: this is a building with a personality strong enough to dictate the plan of every unit inside it.

That matters for the renovation. A curved perimeter fights conventional room division; partitions meet the facade at awkward angles and leave leftover wedges. Removing them was a way of letting the shell lead, rather than forcing an orthogonal layout onto a building that clearly never wanted one.

The Kitchen Island Answers the Building

The kitchen island takes its cue directly from the facade. Its rounded end and curved cream fronts echo the balconies outside, and the stone countertop carries an induction hob and built-in oven so that the island is a full working station rather than a decorative peninsula. Glass-fronted shelving above keeps jars and crockery visible, which reads as a deliberate choice: in a plan with almost no walls, storage that is honest about its contents helps the space feel lived in instead of staged.

Seen through the doorway in warm morning light, the island becomes the pivot of the whole apartment. It is the one object you circulate around, and its soft geometry keeps movement fluid in a way a straight counter would not.

Thresholds Without Doors

Once the walls are gone, the question becomes how you know you have moved from one zone to another. Here the answer is a set of light, almost temporary markers. A pivot door, a hanging linen curtain in a narrow passage, a woven-seat armchair set against flush closet doors: each one signals a shift in use without sealing anything off. Views run through the apartment from end to end, so the kitchen counter is visible from the bedroom side and the dining table from the passage.

The microcement floor helps. Running continuously beneath every zone, it refuses to announce where one room ends, which leaves the joinery and textiles to do that work. The monochrome palette has the same effect, keeping attention on proportion and light rather than on material changes.

The Fireplace as Fixed Point

In a plan built around movable elements, the fireplace is the one thing that does not move, and the studio treats it accordingly. The plaster hood is plain, the hearth is clad in stone, and the whole composition sits beside a floor-to-ceiling glass door that opens onto the balcony and the treetops beyond. It anchors the living area without competing with the joinery.

We like the restraint. A more decorative fireplace would have pulled the apartment back toward a conventional sitting room. Kept this quiet, it reads as part of the shell, a reference point you orient yourself by as the rest of the space changes around it.

A Dining Room That Becomes a Bedroom

This is where the concept is tested most directly. The dining area, with its round timber table and sheer curtains, also serves as an office and a guest bedroom. Instead of a second bedroom, a flexible joinery wall holds a pocket door, a fold-down bed and a pop-out desk. The sequence of images shows the same corner shifting from an open room with a chair and a bird-of-paradise to a sleeping nook with a low bed tucked behind a freestanding panel.

The trade-off is real: you give up a permanent guest room. But in an 80 m² flat, a room that sits empty most of the year is expensive square footage. Folding that function into a wall returns the space to daily use, and the precision of the joinery makes the transformation feel intentional rather than improvised.

A Bedroom That Opens to the Living Space

The main bedroom is separated from the living area by a fitted joinery unit, not a wall. Flush cream wardrobe doors line the room and work as layered filters: open them and the bedroom joins the rest of the apartment; close them and it withdraws. The low linen bed and sheer curtains keep the room soft, while the open balcony door connects it to the same arc of outdoor space as the living room.

That curved balcony, with its rust-colored railings, rounded ceiling and planter boxes, is the apartment's real luxury. Because no partition blocks it, every zone shares a piece of it, which is the strongest practical argument for the subtraction strategy.

A Vanity Outside the Bathroom

The boldest move is in the bathroom, or rather in what used to be one. The stone washbasin sits on a pedestal beyond the bathroom enclosure, framed by tall mirrored panels. Those mirrors are also doors, and they conceal the shower room and WC behind them. In evening light, the panels reflect the bed, the curtain and the window, so the vanity reads less as plumbing and more as a piece of furniture set within the bedroom.

It is a move borrowed from hotel design, and it will not suit everyone. But it pushes the project's logic to its conclusion: only the functions that truly need enclosure get it, and everything else is allowed into the open.

Plans and Drawings

The cutaway axonometric places the unit inside its cloverleaf tower of stacked balconies and round roof terraces, and it explains the half-oval floor plate better than any photograph can. The floor plan shows kitchen, living and dining arranged along the curved glazed edge, with the bedroom and bathrooms pulled toward the interior.

The exploded axonometric is the most revealing drawing in the set. By lifting the joinery volumes off the plan in a separate layer, it shows the apartment as two systems: a fixed shell and an inserted set of furniture-scale objects that define every room. The isometrics confirm how little of the floor is actually enclosed.

Why This Project Matters

Small apartments usually get one of two treatments: carve them into as many rooms as possible, or open them into a single space and accept the loss of privacy. The Kifisia Apartment offers a third option. By turning walls into joinery, it lets one household decide day by day how many rooms it has. The architect has said the idea demanded high precision, and that is the key point. Flexibility only works when the moving parts are built well enough to disappear when closed.

The project also shows respect for an existing building. Rather than fighting the curved 1970s plan, the renovation clears the way for it, letting the facade geometry, the balcony arc and the daylight shape the experience inside. For anyone working with the large stock of postwar apartments across Mediterranean cities, the lesson is clear: sometimes the most useful thing you can add is less.

Kifisia Apartment by Georgios Apostolopoulos Architects. Location: Kifisia, Athens, Greece. Area: 80 m². Year: 2026. Photography: Lorenzo Zandri.

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