Hito.lt Studio Converts a Soviet Paper Factory Club into a Flexible Event Space in Kaunas

Soviet-era culture centers were designed to serve entire factory communities, hosting performances, lectures, and celebrations for workers and their families. When those factories close, the buildings that remain tend to sit empty, too institutional for housing, too sprawling for retail. In the Petrašiūnai industrial district of Kaunas, Lithuania, Hito.lt Studio took on one such building: the former culture center of the Juliaus Janonis paper factory. The result, completed in 2023, is Vynvytis Studio, a 542 square meter venue that houses three distinct studio spaces across two floors, unified by a courtyard that acts as the project's quiet anchor.

What makes the conversion worth studying is the refusal to land on a single identity. Rather than gut the building and impose a clean gallery aesthetic or preserve it as a nostalgic industrial shell, the architects split the difference across floors and then let a planted courtyard mediate between the two. The ground level stays rough: concrete and exposed services. The upper level goes warm: herringbone oak parquet and sculptural bas-reliefs. Each space can operate independently or open into its neighbor, so the building reshapes itself event by event. It is a project about giving an old institution a second life by stripping out the rigidity that defined its first one.

Reading the Facade's Layers

The exterior doesn't pretend the building is new. White concrete and stucco wrap the structure, but the deep-set portals and recessed window openings betray the mass of the original walls. Look closely and you can spot architectural adjustments from different periods layered into the facade, slight variations in texture and tone that the architects chose to emphasize rather than plaster over. The effect is a surface that reads as geological, accumulated over decades rather than designed in a single pass.

Dark metal window frames punch through the white planes, creating sharp contrasts that give the facade a graphic quality without relying on applied ornament. Planted beds push right up against the base of the columns, softening what would otherwise be a monolithic wall. It is a restrained exterior that signals transformation without shouting about it.

The Courtyard as Spatial Mediator

The inner courtyard is the project's best idea. Carved out of the building's footprint, it functions as a natural extension of the interior studios rather than a leftover void. Concrete pavers divide the ground plane into quadrants, and young trees rise through dense groundcover and layered planting beds designed in collaboration with landscape architect Ūla Maria Studio. A slatted bench occupies the center of the composition, framed on all sides by foliage that will only thicken with time.

Cable trellises run along the courtyard walls, inviting climbing plants to eventually blur the boundary between architecture and vegetation. The contrast is deliberate: strict white planes meet soft, unruly green. For a venue that hosts celebrations and workshops, the courtyard offers something none of the interior rooms can: open sky, seasonal change, and a sense of enclosure that feels protective rather than confining.

Planting as Architecture

The landscape strategy extends beyond the courtyard into planted terraces and beds that line arrival paths and frame entry sequences. Steps descend through dense vegetation toward a dark rear wall where climbing vines have already begun their ascent. The planting is not decorative afterthought; it is structured to create spatial compression and release, guiding movement the way walls and columns do inside.

Young trees between concrete paving slabs along the facade columns will eventually form a canopy that reshapes the building's public face entirely. Hito.lt Studio seems to understand that the project is incomplete at handover. The landscape is designed to mature, and the building's character will shift with it season by season.

Ground Floor: Raw and Intimate

The ground floor retains the building's industrial DNA. Concrete surfaces are left exposed, ductwork runs uncovered across the ceiling, and finishes stay deliberately rough. A long counter with a raw concrete base and oak top faces tall windows overlooking the planted terrace, merging bar and workbench into a single piece of furniture. Plywood benches with exposed laminated edges meet dark tiled floors, reinforcing the material honesty that defines this level.

A kitchen space tucks behind light birch cabinetry, its pendant lights providing warmth without formality. The ground floor reads as a workshop that happens to host gatherings: the kind of space where spilled wine on concrete is part of the deal. That casualness is not accidental. By keeping the lower level unfinished, the architects lower the threshold for use. A creative workshop, an informal meeting, a small dinner: all fit without requiring the space to perform.

Upper Floor: Oak, Light, and the Bas-Relief

Ascend one level and the atmosphere shifts entirely. Herringbone oak parquet covers the floors, white columns march through open rooms, and spherical pendant lights hang at varying heights from a clean white ceiling. The material palette narrows to oak and plaster, creating a backdrop that recedes behind whatever activity fills the room. Deep-set windows pull daylight through thick walls, casting the kind of slow, angled light that makes even an empty room feel occupied.

The most striking intervention on the upper floor is a figurative wall drawing, a sculptural bas-relief by artist Gintarė Konde that wraps across a massive wall. The mural depicts the dynamic energy of gatherings and celebrations, its flowing lines contrasting with the strict geometry of the columns and floor pattern. It gives the hall a focal point that is neither nostalgic nor generic: a commissioned artwork that belongs specifically to this space and this program.

Column Grids and the Logic of Division

The existing structural columns do the heavy lifting in making flexibility real. Rather than demolishing interior walls to create one open loft, the architects leveraged the column grid to frame doorways and subdivide the upper hall into zones that can be opened or closed depending on the event. White columns act as implied walls: they define thresholds without blocking sightlines, and they give the space rhythm without rigidity.

A corner room with two deep-set windows and a pair of tripod stools shows how the smallest subdivisions still hold their own as self-contained spaces. The proportions are generous, the light is good, and the parquet floor runs uninterrupted through every opening. The three distinct studios Hito.lt delivers here are not created by inserting partitions but by reading the existing structure and letting it suggest where one space ends and another begins.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plans reveal how tightly the courtyard is woven into the building's circulation. On one drawing, the interior living space sits directly adjacent to the terraced courtyard, with circular tree symbols indicating mature planting that will eventually read as rooms in their own right. The second plan shows the colonnade and entrance hall below, with the courtyard's planted quadrants visible above. What the plans make clear is that the courtyard is not a gap in the building: it is the building's organizational spine, the element around which every room orients.

Why This Project Matters

Adaptive reuse projects tend to fall into two camps: reverential preservation that treats the original building as untouchable, or total transformation that erases history in favor of a clean slate. Vynvytis Studio sidesteps both. By splitting the material identity across floors, keeping the ground level raw and finishing the upper level with warmth and precision, Hito.lt Studio lets the building hold two identities simultaneously. The courtyard then stitches them together, offering a shared outdoor room that belongs equally to the concrete below and the oak above.

The broader lesson is about flexibility as a design ethic rather than a buzzword. Flexibility here does not mean moveable walls or modular furniture systems. It means reading an existing structure carefully, understanding what it already does well, and then making the smallest interventions necessary to open it up to new possibilities. For a former Soviet factory club in an industrial district of Kaunas, that is exactly the right ambition.

Vynvytis Studio by Hito.lt Studio, Petrašiūnai, Kaunas, Lithuania. 542 m². Completed 2023. Photography by Lukas Mykolaitis.

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