02A Studio Tunes a 1960s Roman Apartment to Resonate with Its Own History

Renovation in Rome is a loaded act. Every wall carries the weight of something that came before, and in a city that treats its own stratigraphy as civic identity, the decision to preserve rather than gut is never neutral. 02A Studio understood this when they took on VDS House, a 130 square meter apartment inside a four-story rationalist block in the Conca D'Oro district, north of the Aniene river. The neighborhood is no postcard. It was shaped by post-war housing pressures, built fast to accommodate a growing population, and its buildings carry the honest, utilitarian logic of that era: brick facades, cruciform concrete pillars, terrazzo floors that have outlasted every trend thrown at them.

What makes this project worth studying is the discipline of its restraint. 02A Studio preserved the original plan almost wholesale, directing surgical interventions toward the kitchen, bathrooms, and the reinterpretation of the central hallway as a threshold device that separates public from private life. There are no grand spatial gestures here, no walls blown out to create a fashionable open plan. Instead, the apartment is refined in place: its existing terrazzo and Bardiglio marble baseboards are kept, and new elements like custom plaster ceilings, lacquer-red diamond-shaped openings, and reeded glass portals are introduced with the precision of edits in a well-revised manuscript.

The Hallway as Spatial Instrument

In most apartment renovations, the corridor is the first thing to go. It gets absorbed into a larger room or reduced to a vestigial passage. Here, the hallway is elevated to the status of a design protagonist. It operates as the main artery of the plan, mediating between the social zones at one end and the bedrooms at the other. Wallpapered boiserie shifts register along its length, bold near the entrance and quieter as it moves toward the sleeping quarters, a material cue that communicates spatial hierarchy without doors or partitions.

The pair of lacquer-red diamond-shaped openings punched along this axis are the apartment's most distinctive move. Framed in vivid red and filled with translucent glass, they establish a visual cross-axis linking the building's two primary facades. Light and color bleed through them, and they function as both window and wall, mediating transparency and enclosure with a single gesture. They are sculptural, yes, but they also solve a practical problem: binding distant rooms into a single perceptual field.

Living Room Ceiling and the Echo of Roman Plasterwork

The living room ceiling deserves its own paragraph because it does something genuinely clever. The building's undulating facade creates an irregular geometry at the perimeter of the room, a problem that many renovations would solve with a flat dropped ceiling or simply ignore. 02A Studio instead installed a dense lattice of custom plaster moldings that creates a rhythmic, coffered plane overhead. It reads as ornament, but it is performing structural coherence, knitting together the uneven edges of the space into a unified volume.

The reference to Roman plasterwork traditions is deliberate but not nostalgic. These moldings do not mimic historical profiles; they abstract them into a contemporary register. The result is a ceiling that feels substantial without being heavy, that gives the living room a sense of intentionality that extends vertically. Below, the pale cerulean walls and original terrazzo floor form a neutral shell against which the timber-clad media alcove and blue drapery operate as warm, focused insertions.

Shelving, Sound, and the Life of Objects

The wall-mounted modular shelving unit in the dining area, with its timber cabinets and black metal framework, is a piece of furniture that doubles as architecture. It defines the dining zone without enclosing it, and its open-and-closed rhythm gives the owners a way to curate what is shown and what is hidden. Across the room, the timber-clad media alcove with its blue curtain conceals acoustic panels and a dedicated sound system, a detail born from the residents' love of analog music.

The study nook, tucked against the facade with a built-in desk and tricolor curtain panels, demonstrates how 02A Studio extracts maximum program from minimal intervention. There is no dedicated study room in the plan; instead, the alcove at the window becomes one, filtered by daylight and bordered by timber shelving. The apartment's livability comes from these calibrated pockets of use, not from sheer square footage.

The Red-Framed Threshold

The translucent red-framed partitions between the kitchen and dining area are the project's most photogenic detail, but they are more than that. They function as controlled thresholds: open, they merge the kitchen into the social zone; closed, they filter light into a warm glow that softens the transition between cooking and eating. The chevron handle on the door is a small but deliberate touch, an industrial motif that grounds the otherwise decorative frame in a material logic.

Inside the kitchen, white mosaic tile walls and a circular red-framed mirror continue the chromatic theme. The red is not arbitrary. It recurs only at points of transition, at doors, mirrors, and openings, creating a visual shorthand for threshold. You learn to read the apartment through these signals: red means passage.

Two Bathrooms, Two Temperaments

The two bathrooms are designed as deliberate opposites. The guest bathroom wraps itself in mint green tile, terrazzo flooring, and an orange vanity, a palette that evokes mid-century Roman domestic culture without resorting to pastiche. An arched shower enclosure and oval mirror above the pedestal sink add soft geometry, and the overall effect is warm, tactile, almost nostalgic. The patterned tile wall with its diagonal lattice motif and blue border trim is a detail that rewards close looking.

The second bathroom takes a warmer, earthier direction: orange tile wainscoting, vertical striped wallpaper, an arched timber-framed mirror, and natural brass fixtures. Where the guest bath is cool and graphic, this one is intimate and enveloping. The duality is intentional. It demonstrates that identity in a home does not have to be uniform; each room can carry its own mood as long as the underlying material logic remains consistent.

Bedroom and the Quiet End of the Plan

The bedroom is the calmest room in the apartment, as it should be. A white paper pendant lamp, sheer curtains, and layered textiles on the bed create a space that feels deliberately unadorned after the chromatic intensity of the rest of the home. The arched doorway framed by timber cabinetry that leads to the adjacent bathroom is a generous detail, transforming a utilitarian connection into a framed view. It is a small example of what the entire project does at a larger scale: treating every transition as an opportunity for architecture.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan confirms what the photographs suggest: the original layout was kept largely intact, with the hallway running as a central spine from which rooms branch in a logical sequence. The section drawings reveal the careful vertical calibration of the plaster ceiling in the living room, and the axonometric views of the bathrooms and dining area show how material choices were coordinated room by room. The dressing room axonometric, with its blue paneled wardrobes and period-dressed figure, is a charming editorial touch that signals the architects' awareness of the apartment as a stage for daily life.

Why This Project Matters

VDS House matters because it refuses the dominant logic of contemporary apartment renovation, which tends to treat existing conditions as obstacles. The terrazzo floors, the Bardiglio marble, the irregular facade geometry: all of these are treated not as problems to be solved but as starting points for design. The result is a home that feels continuous with its building and its neighborhood, a place where 2020s living habits coexist with 1960s materiality without one dominating the other.

There is a lesson here for any practice working in established urban fabric. The city, as 02A Studio seems to understand it, is a palimpsest. Each generation adds a layer, and the best additions are the ones that make the existing layers legible rather than obscuring them. The lacquer-red frames, the custom plaster ceiling, the paired bathrooms: these are confident, authored interventions. But they succeed precisely because they know when to stop. In a discipline that too often confuses ambition with erasure, that is a posture worth taking seriously.

VDS House by 02A Studio, Conca D'Oro, Rome, Italy. 130 m². Photography by Paolo Fusco.

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