Set Architects Cuts Two Openings into a Roman Apartment and Lets Reflective Furniture Do the Rest

Roman apartments from the early 20th century were built as sequences of closed rooms: load-bearing walls, tall ceilings, doors opening onto doors. For a young family in the Nomentano district, a short walk from Villa Torlonia, Set Architects has reworked one of these flats into something far more fluid. The design was led by Onorato di Manno and Andrea Tanci. The structural intervention was minimal: just two new openings cut into the bearing walls of the living area, which link kitchen, dining room, living room and a relaxation area into one continuous sequence.

What interests us is how little demolition this took and how much work the furniture now does. Full-height folding panels and sliding doors let the family adjust how open the plan is. A curved, glossy blue-gray wardrobe redirects movement through the hallway. Stainless steel, lacquer and mirror bounce the Roman light around rooms with ceilings close to 4 m high. The original colored-glass doors and decorative moldings stay where they were. The result is a renovation that treats joinery as architecture and the existing shell as something worth keeping.

Two Cuts Instead of a Gut Renovation

The tempting move in a flat like this is to strip it back to an open loft. Set Architects resisted that. Only two openings were added to the load-bearing walls, and no other structural changes are reported. The old room logic still reads; it simply no longer traps you.

These views show the strategy at work. You see the kitchen in slices, framed by tall white panels and glazed doors, so the plan feels connected without collapsing into one undifferentiated room. The custom oak parquet runs continuously underfoot in a single geometric pattern. It is the thread that ties the reconnected rooms together.

A Kitchen Clad in Steel

The kitchen is the least domestic room in the flat, and that seems deliberate. A brushed steel island faces a wall of full-height steel cabinets, an almost professional assembly set against a tall window reveal. Inside an early 20th-century shell, the contrast is sharp but not careless.

Steel matters here for more than its look. Its soft sheen picks up daylight from the deep window and carries it across the room. That turns a utilitarian surface into one of the apartment's main light-handling devices, and it is the clearest early sign of what the project title promises.

Color and Lacquer at the Table

The dining zone softens the steel. A pink-topped table, wooden chairs and two cone pendants sit inside a frame of glossy pale blue shelving that works as both storage and a viewing device. Look through it and the kitchen becomes a composed picture.

The palette is restrained, but it isn't timid. Small doses of saturated color appear where people gather, and lacquer gives even the pastels a reflective edge. This is where the apartment feels most like a family home rather than a design exercise.

Panels That Decide How Open the Plan Is

The real argument of the project is in these doors. Frosted glass sliders and pocket doors let the family close off a reading nook or a shelving wall, or open everything into one long run of space. The comparison to Japanese fusuma comes easily: the partitions are thin, full height and meant to be moved daily, not once a decade.

For a young family, that flexibility is practical. The brief asked for spaces that could adapt over time, and here adaptation needs no contractor. A green velvet sofa tucked behind a pocket door is a private room one minute and part of the living area the next.

The Curved Wardrobe as Traffic Control

The most memorable object in the flat is the full-height curved wardrobe in glossy blue-gray lacquer. It sits in the hallway and bends circulation toward the bedrooms, separating the public half of the apartment from the private half without a single new wall.

Its gloss is doing double duty. The curve catches window light and stretches it along the corridor, while the original paneled doors with textured glass sit right beside it. Old and new share the same few square meters here, and neither has been sanded down to suit the other.

Bathrooms Built from Mirror and White

In the bathrooms, the reflective theme becomes literal. Large mirrors and mirrored cabinets double the rooms visually, and white built-ins and a solid white bathtub keep the field calm. The parquet continues through the doorways, so even the wet rooms feel part of the same domestic surface.

Wall-mounted taps and double basins keep the counters clear. Combined with the mirrors, the rooms read larger and more open than their footprint suggests.

Basins Treated as Objects

Two fixtures stand out. A stainless steel trough sink sits on a black mirrored vanity in front of a window full of leaves. Elsewhere, a cylindrical steel pedestal basin is revealed through a narrow gap between white walls. Both are handled like sculpture rather than plumbing.

They also bring the kitchen's steel language into the most private rooms. That kind of consistency is what keeps a renovation with this many distinct pieces from feeling assembled out of parts.

Plans and Drawings

The plan shows how the logic works. A central corridor still organizes bedrooms and bathrooms on one side, while the kitchen island, dining table and two living rooms now read as a linked chain on the other. The curved wardrobe marks the hinge between the two halves. You can see how two targeted openings rewired a plan that otherwise keeps its historic bones.

Why This Project Matters

Europe's historic housing stock is full of apartments like this one: generous ceilings, beautiful details, and plans written for a way of living nobody practices anymore. Set Architects shows that you don't need to erase that inheritance to make it work for a modern family. A couple of precise structural cuts, plus joinery that moves, gets you most of the way there.

The project is also a case for spending design effort on furniture-scale elements. The wardrobe, the sliding panels and the steel kitchen carry the spatial ideas here, and the reflective finishes make the most of the light a Roman flat already has. It is a lighter, more reversible kind of renovation, and we think more architects should be taking it seriously.

House with Reflective Furniture by Set Architects (lead architects Onorato di Manno and Andrea Tanci), Rome, Italy. Area: 200 m². Completed: 2026. Photography: Federico Farinatti.

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