Kilo / Honc Carves a Landscape of In-Between Spaces from an 80 m² Slovak Apartment

Developer apartments come with a familiar contract: corridor, bedroom, corridor, bathroom, living room. The sequence is efficient and entirely predictable, and it turns 80 square metres into a series of boxes. When Kilo / Honc took on a standard-layout flat in Piešťany, Slovakia, they broke that contract. The Pink Mill Apartment, completed in 2023, strips away the dark hallways and sealed-off rooms of the original plan, replacing them with a spatial landscape where function is suggested rather than assigned.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is not merely the addition of a mezzanine, though the extra 17 square metres of living area gained from 3.5-metre ceilings is significant. It is the way the architects treat ambiguity as a design tool. Rooms here resist precise definition. A reading nook doubles as a balcony overlooking the living space; a corridor becomes a gallery; a bathroom opens up beneath exposed timber joists as though it were another room, not a utility closet. The result is an apartment that feels substantially larger than its footprint, not through tricks but through a refusal to partition experience.

Vertical Expansion Under Concrete Skies

The raw concrete ceiling, left exposed, does double duty. It provides an honest datum line that registers the full 3.5-metre height of the original volume, and it acts as a textural counterweight to the light timber structure inserted below it. White ship ladders rise to the mezzanine platform, their slender profiles keeping sightlines open across the double-height living space. The ladders are deliberately minimal: they invite ascent without visually chopping the room in half.

By suspending a timber loft rather than building a conventional second floor, the architects preserve the sense of a single continuous volume. You are never fully upstairs or downstairs. You are somewhere in between, which is precisely the point.

The Timber Loft as Inhabited Furniture

The mezzanine reads less like a floor and more like a large piece of furniture dropped into the apartment. Exposed timber joists give it a skeletal, workshop quality, and its edges are lined with bookshelves that serve as both storage and guardrail. Sitting on the platform with legs dangling over the edge, as one resident is photographed doing, turns the loft into a kind of domestic balcony. The boundary between circulation and habitation dissolves.

Potted plants colonize the platform's perimeter, softening the junction between rough concrete above and warm timber below. The planting is casual, not decorative: it reinforces the sense that this is a landscape to be occupied rather than a room to be furnished.

Kitchen and Living: Open Shelving as Spatial Filter

The kitchen sits within the open plan but is subtly zoned through an open shelving unit that frames views toward the loft structure above. Rather than a solid wall or even a half-height partition, the shelves act as a permeable membrane. Light, sound, and sightlines pass through; only objects stop. It is a smart move in a compact apartment, where any opaque barrier would immediately shrink the perceived volume.

Stainless steel cabinetry in the galley zone brings an industrial clarity that pairs well with the concrete ceiling, while sheer white curtains at the windows diffuse the light arriving from three cardinal orientations. The combination keeps the kitchen feeling utilitarian without being cold.

Corridors Reclaimed: Partitions and Thresholds

Where the original layout funnelled movement through narrow corridors, the renovation replaces walls with freestanding white partitions and translucent sliding panels. These elements suggest division without enforcing it. A coat rack mounted to an exposed column, a storage unit capped by timber beams: the circulation zones are treated as inhabitable space, not leftover square metres.

The pale resin floor runs continuously throughout, eliminating the material transitions that typically telegraph a change in room function. You move from entry to kitchen to bedroom without the floor ever telling you that you have crossed a threshold. That continuity is essential to the apartment's fluidity.

Bathroom as Room, Not Afterthought

The bathroom is one of the most resolved moments in the apartment. Exposed timber joists run overhead, connecting the wet zone to the material palette of the rest of the home rather than isolating it behind a glossy door. White grid tiles on the shower walls offer a geometric rhythm that feels deliberate without being fussy, and a raised shower platform creates a subtle level change that marks the wet area without needing a full enclosure.

A glass partition separates the shower from the double vanity, keeping the room visually open. Polished concrete floors ground the space, and the overall effect is closer to a well-appointed changing room than a typical apartment bathroom. It is generous in atmosphere even at a modest scale.

Secondary details reinforce the care taken here: open shelving for toiletries replaces mirrored cabinets, a white storage unit tucks beneath timber beams, and natural light filters in through the corridor. The bathroom is not hidden; it participates in the apartment's broader choreography of light and movement.

Bedroom and Quiet Moments

The bedroom is glimpsed through a doorway framed by an exposed concrete column and beam, a detail that gives the threshold a monumental quality disproportionate to the apartment's size. This is the one zone where enclosure is permitted, where intimacy wins over openness. Even so, the material continuity of concrete and timber links it back to the larger whole.

A corridor view past wall-mounted hooks and a radiator shows the apartment at its most domestic and understated. These quieter passages are just as considered as the double-height living space; they prove that the design ambition extends to every corner, not just the photogenic ones.

Before: The Developer Shell

Construction photographs reveal the raw concrete shell that Kilo / Honc inherited. Black-framed windows cast sharp grid shadows across bare floors, and a corridor of concrete openings leads to a lone blue door. The images are a useful reminder of just how much spatial work went into the renovation. The bones were good, with generous ceiling height and light from multiple orientations, but the original layout did nothing to exploit them.

Plans and Drawings

The axonometric drawing shows the apartment as a compact volume with a rooftop pavilion and courtyard, situating the project within its building context. Comparing the original floor plan to the renovated first and second floor plans makes the transformation legible: enclosed rooms and a central bathroom give way to an open field of activity with the mezzanine level floating above. The second-floor plan, with its planted elements, confirms that the greenery visible in the photographs is integral to the design rather than an afterthought.

Why This Project Matters

The Pink Mill Apartment matters because it demonstrates that spatial generosity is not a function of square metres. At 80 m², this is not a large home. But by refusing the corridor-and-box logic that developer layouts default to, Kilo / Honc extract a richness of experience that many apartments twice the size cannot offer. The added 17 square metres of loft area are meaningful, but the real gain is perceptual: the apartment feels like a place with depth, with moments of compression and release, with views that shift as you climb a ladder or round a partition.

The project also offers a replicable lesson for compact renovations anywhere. High ceilings are underused in most standard apartments. A mezzanine, a few open shelving units, and a commitment to material continuity can turn a generic flat into something specific and personal. Kilo / Honc did not need an exotic site or an extraordinary budget. They needed a clear idea about how space should feel, and the discipline to carry it through every room, every threshold, and every detail.

Pink Mill Apartment by Kilo / Honc. Piešťany, Slovakia. 80 m². Completed 2023. Photography by Matej Hakár.

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