LBWA Plays Blue Joinery Against Walnut and Marble in a 68 m² Tenement Apartment in Poznań's Łazarz District

Łazarz is one of Poznań's tenement districts, a grid of masonry apartment blocks with tall windows, deep reveals and paneled doors. Renovating a flat in a building like this usually forces a choice. You can strip it back to a neutral white box, or you can restore it into a period piece. In this 68 m² apartment, completed in 2024, the LBWA studio does neither. The existing envelope stays legible: arched window heads, paneled doors and pine floorboards. A small, disciplined set of new materials then sits inside it.

That set is short: saturated blue cabinetry, walnut, grey-veined marble and cream upholstery, with one red accent in the bathroom. What interests us is the restraint in how the colour is deployed. The blue never spreads across walls or ceilings. It stays in the joinery, the pieces you touch and open. This lets the colour read as furniture rather than decoration, and it lets the historic shell read as the backdrop it was always meant to be.

A Kitchen Built from Two Colours and One Stone

The kitchen run is the clearest statement of the palette. Blue base units carry a black oven and induction hob, and a grey-veined marble backsplash rises above them. The walnut appears as open shelving, holding glasses and an espresso machine. Each material does one job: blue for the closed storage, walnut for display, marble for the wet and hot zones.

The blue and copper arched pendant over the counter is a small but telling move. Its silhouette echoes the arched window heads elsewhere in the flat, so a historic motif comes back as a contemporary object rather than as applied moulding.

The Round Table as the Apartment's Centre

In a 68 m² plan, the dining table has to mediate between kitchen and living room. A round walnut top is the sensible choice here. It has no head of the table, no hard corners to collide with in a tight circulation zone, and it lets the black bentwood and cantilever chairs slide around it as needed.

Look at how the tall walnut cabinet anchors the corner. It reads as a freestanding wardrobe as much as a kitchen unit, which helps the open kitchen sit comfortably in a room that was almost certainly not designed to hold one. The framed portrait on the wall reinforces that domestic, rather than showroom, register.

Paneled Doors as Picture Frames

Several of the strongest views are taken through doorways, and that is a deliberate reading of the building type. Tenement apartments are rooms strung along thresholds, and their paneled white doors turn each opening into a frame. LBWA keeps the doors white and lets the colour sit beyond them, so you see a slice of blue kitchen or a walnut headboard before you enter the room.

The bedroom is the quietest space in the flat. A walnut headboard, a white round side table and globe pendants stand on the same pine boards. The blue drops out entirely, which makes the private rooms feel calmer than the shared ones.

Arched Windows and a Curved Sofa

The living area is organised around two arched windows that frame the tree canopy outside. Rather than competing with them, the furniture answers their geometry: a cream sectional with a curved profile and stacked marble tables with rounded edges. The palette here is pale, so the green foliage becomes the dominant colour in summer.

Low sunlight does a lot of work in these images, raking across the floorboards and the pleated lamp. It is a reminder that the generous ceiling heights and tall openings of old tenements are an asset that contemporary flats rarely match. The renovation is smart enough not to obstruct them.

Material Close-Ups: Pine, Marble and Light

The detail shots reveal the logic of the palette at close range. Veined marble meets plain pine floorboards, and the contrast between polished stone and soft, knotted timber keeps the flat from feeling too precious. Open timber shelving with books and plants stands beside the sofa, softening the line between living room and library.

Overhead, the blue arched pendant above the dining table repeats the kitchen light and ties the two zones together. Lighting is treated as a set of objects with identities rather than a hidden grid, a choice that suits rooms with this kind of ceiling height.

A Bathroom that Carries the Kitchen's Language

The bathroom borrows directly from the kitchen: a floating blue drawer, a marble top, a walnut-framed mirror and two globe lights. Repeating the trio of blue, walnut and marble in a wet room is a quiet way to make a small flat feel coherent. You move between rooms and the material conversation continues.

Behind the glass shower screen, vertical glossy white tiles do the opposite of the kitchen backsplash. They are plain and reflective, and they stretch the room upward rather than adding pattern.

One Red Radiator

The single departure from the palette is a tall red column radiator, paired with a maroon door. It is the most daring decision in the project and also the most functional one, because it turns a necessary heating element into the room's focal point. The radiator also nods to the cast-iron column heaters that are familiar from old Central European apartments.

The built-in oval tub below the window keeps the bathroom tied to daylight, which many renovations sacrifice. Combined with the red accent, it makes the bathroom feel like a room rather than a utility space.

Plans and Drawings

The plan shows two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a combined kitchen, dining and living room. Opening the social rooms into a single sequence is the main planning change you would expect in a tenement flat of this size. The bedrooms remain separate rooms behind their own doors, preserving the threshold-driven character that the photographs emphasise.

Why This Project Matters

Poland's tenement stock is being renovated at scale, and too many of these interiors end up either gutted into anonymous white boxes or dressed up as nostalgic set pieces. This apartment offers a third path. It keeps the architecture that makes these buildings worth living in, such as the arched windows, paneled doors and floorboards, and it confines the new design to joinery, furniture and light.

The lesson for you as a designer is about discipline with colour. A strong blue used everywhere would overwhelm 68 m². Used only in the cabinets, and answered by walnut, marble and a single red radiator, it gives the flat an identity without fighting the building. Small apartments rarely need more materials; they need fewer, placed with intent.

Apartment Interior within Poznań's Łazarz District by LBWA (lead architect Maria Łuczkowska), Poznań, Poland. Area: 68 m². Completed: 2024. Photography: Zasoby Studio.

About the Studio

LBWA

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