LBWA Renovates a 1930s Modernist Villa in Poznań by Keeping Its Original Floors and Tuning Rooms to the Sun

In the old part of Poznań's Grunwald district, beside the Abisynia housing estate, stands a 1930s villa built under the strict development rules of its era: geometric, unornamented, without the rustication or pilasters its neighbours from a decade earlier might have worn. Its new owners bought it in a state that needed thorough renovation. They asked LBWA, led by architect Maria Łuczkowska, to bring back its character, not to remake it. The result, completed in 2023, is a 220 m² home that reads less like a makeover and more like a careful edit.

What interests us is the restraint. The original wooden windows, doors and floors stay in place, and the new layer of gray limestone, green marble, brass and minimalist built-ins is pitched as a background, not a statement. The more consequential move is invisible in any single photograph: LBWA reorganised the plan around the house's existing sun path, putting the kitchen to the east for morning light and opening the living room west to the garden. It is a modernist logic, applied to a modernist building, with almost no need for new architecture.

A Living Room That Faces the Garden

The west-facing day zone is where the plan's orientation pays off. A sliding glass door opens onto a timber deck, and beyond it the mature conifers do most of the decorative work. LBWA furnishes the room with low timber-framed seating and a travertine block table, pieces that sit close to the herringbone oak and keep sightlines to the garden open.

Notice what is absent: no feature wall, no oversized lighting gesture, no imported drama. The room relies on the window, the floor and the greenery outside. You could argue this is simply good taste, but it is also a deliberate reading of a 1930s house, where the view and the light were meant to be the ornament.

Designing for Light Across the Day

These three frames show the same idea under different conditions. In late sun, the window grid throws hard shadows across the plaster behind the cream sofa; under overcast skies, the reading corner with its full bookshelf turns soft and even; in the bedroom, low sun draws window shapes across a pale wall above a rust quilt.

The palette is clearly calibrated for this. Cream, oak, travertine and white plaster all take light well and show its changes. A darker or glossier scheme would have flattened those shifts. Here the walls act almost as a sundial, which is a modest but real reward for keeping the original orientation and openings intact.

The Kitchen as a Stone Object

The east-side kitchen, with its small balcony, catches morning sun across pine floorboards. Its centrepiece is an island clad in rough-veined grey marble with a brass tap, treated less as a work surface and more as a solid block placed in the room. The earthy beige cabinetry and a brass-detailed niche keep the rest of the kitchen quiet.

The connection to the living room deserves attention. A pair of frosted glass doors, flanked by round wall sconces, separates the two spaces without sealing them off. The kitchen stays visible as a glow and a silhouette, which suits a house that was built as discrete rooms rather than one open plan.

Dining Among Books and Evergreens

The oval timber table and black leather chairs sit in front of a tall window onto evergreens, with a dark timber bookcase anchoring the wall. It is the most traditional-feeling room in the house, and the darker joinery gives it weight against the lighter living areas.

The doorway view is the telling image. A built-in bookshelf frames the opening, an old radiator stays in place, and the herringbone floor runs straight through. LBWA lets you read the house as a sequence of thresholds, each one framing the next room, which is how a villa of this period was meant to be experienced.

Original Joinery, Floors and the Stair

This is the fabric the owners wanted to protect. The hallway keeps its herringbone parquet and a paneled door with reeded glass; the staircase keeps its white turned balusters and pale timber treads. A red abstract painting on the landing is the only loud note, and it works precisely because everything around it is old and settled.

Retaining historic joinery is slower and often more expensive than replacing it, and it constrains the designer. The payoff is authenticity you cannot buy: proportions, profiles and wear that no new door or stair would reproduce. We would like to see more renovations make this trade.

A Private Upper Floor

Upstairs, the bedrooms continue the language of timber, globe lamps and saturated textiles, with radiators left beside the windows. Small details carry the period: an oak bedside table sits beneath a porcelain double switch, a fitting that ties the new furniture to the age of the house.

A freestanding white bathtub under a frosted casement window, framed between two wall planes, shows how LBWA handles the existing openings. The window stays where it was; the room is arranged to suit it.

Bathrooms Behind Fluted Glass

The bathrooms are where the new material palette is most concentrated. A fluted glass panel in an oak frame screens a freestanding tub over a terrazzo floor, letting light through while blurring the view. A floating oak vanity with a green stone top and a rounded mirror sits beside it.

In a second bathroom, a floating grey stone vanity with a wall-mounted tap and black-framed mirror takes a more austere line. The two rooms share a method, floating fixtures and a single dominant stone, but each has its own temperament.

Wet Rooms in Marble and Limestone

The showers lean on stone surfaces: dark green marble behind a glass screen, a brown stone slab wall with a cylindrical rain head, pale panels over a grey stone floor with a linear drain. Afternoon light rakes across the plaster beside the wall-hung toilet, proving that even the service rooms were planned with daylight in mind.

Stone of this kind can tip into luxury-hotel cliché. Here it stays grounded because the rooms are small, the fittings are minimal and the material colours echo the garden outside the day zone.

Plans and Drawings

The ground floor plan arranges dining, lounge, kitchen island and a study around a central hallway and stair core, preserving the villa's room-by-room structure while easing movement between the day spaces. The upper floor holds a double bedroom, a single bedroom and two bathrooms with freestanding tubs off a corridor. Read together, the plans confirm that LBWA worked within the original massing, adjusting use and light rather than rebuilding walls.

Why This Project Matters

Poland's interwar modernist housing is an under-appreciated stock, and much of it is vulnerable to two opposite failures: neglect, or renovation so aggressive that only the shell survives. This villa shows a third path. By keeping original floors, windows and doors, and by reading the building's orientation as a design brief, LBWA treats the house as a working modernist document rather than a backdrop for new finishes.

For practitioners, the lesson is that a renovation's strongest decisions may be the ones that leave things alone. The new layer of limestone, green marble and brass is well chosen, but it succeeds because it defers to light, plan and fabric that were already there. That is a harder discipline than invention, and in a district shaped by strict 1930s rules, it feels like the right one.

Modernist Harmony in a Historic Villa by LBWA (lead architect Maria Łuczkowska), Poznań, Poland. Area: 220 m². Completed: 2023. Photography by Zasoby Studio.

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