Kifisia Apartment

At the entrance to Kifisia, where the avenue comes in from Athens, a pair of round volumes stands clear of the ground on cylindrical supports. This is the Stroggyli Polykatoikia — the round apartment building — designed by Nikos Despotidis and built in 1973–1974. The concrete is left exposed and the balconies run continuously around the circumference, so the elevation reads as a stack of horizontal bands with neither a front nor a back. Contemporaries treated the structure as a technical accomplishment, and accounts from the period describe architects travelling from abroad to see how it had been done. It has been a fixed point in the northern suburbs ever since, known by its shape rather than by its address, though remarkably little about it has been written down: the building appears in no published survey of significant Athenian apartment buildings, and Despotidis himself leaves almost no published trace.

The geometry sets the terms for everything inside it. The perimeter curves away continuously, so partitions meet the façade at an angle that changes along its length, and the corners a rectangular plan would rely on are not available. The 80 m² apartment that Georgios Apostolopoulos Architects has now reworked was organised as a sequence of enclosed rooms: two narrow corridors, the bathroom occupying the centre, and the principal living areas compressed into a narrow zone with limited access to daylight.

The renovation began by taking things away. Every internal partition was removed, leaving the existing structure exposed and the floor plate readable in one view. What followed did not put the walls back. Georgios Apostolopoulos Architects treats the apartment as a continuous interior and hands the work of division to a set of joinery elements, which define how each part of the plan is used without closing it off. The question the project puts is whether a home needs rooms at all, or only the things that rooms were supposed to provide.

The kitchen answers first. Placed at the centre of the plan, it is built as a solid volume and handled less as a room than as an object to be inhabited — cooking, working and meeting all collect around it. The island can be approached and used from every side, which is what makes it the social instrument of the apartment rather than a service counter: it supports the routines of a day without setting an order for them. Living and dining open out from it through gentle transitions rather than doorways.

That continuity carries into the main bedroom, which reads as an extension of the living area instead of a sealed room. The vanity runs past the bathroom enclosure, and the wardrobes work as layered filters rather than partitions. Privacy here is not fixed in the plan but adjusted in use — a matter of where someone stands and what is drawn across, negotiated through occupation.

At the far end of the apartment the second bedroom is not built. In its place sits a flexible joinery system: a fold-down bed, an integrated desk and sliding panels that let the same square metres move between sleeping, working and storage. It behaves less like a room than like a piece of domestic equipment, and it is the clearest statement of the project's argument — that use can be held by furniture as competently as by walls.

The material handling keeps out of the way of all this. A monochromatic palette holds the interior quiet and lets the original structure stay present in the room, while slim-frame windows admit as much light as the openings allow, so the continuity between one part of the plan and the next is carried by daylight as much as by geometry.

What results is a domestic interior organised as a system of spatial relationships rather than a collection of rooms: boundaries that stay fluid, privacy that can be dialled up or down, and a plan whose order emerges from how it is lived in.