project: apartment
year: 2026
location: Athens
status: completed
photo: Nikos Kuklakis
This old apartment on Acharnon Street in Athens feels suspended in time, and the renovation approach was deliberately light-handed, aiming to preserve that quality rather than erase it. The flat follows the classic layout of a well-off Athenian family home from its era: a generous entrance hall leads into the living room, sliding doors open through to the dining room, which in turn flows into a small kitchen, then a laundry, a guest bathroom, and finally a separate wing for the bedrooms and en-suite bathroom overlooking the internal courtyard. From the living room windows there is an uninterrupted view of the dome of Saint Panteleimon, while at the center of the apartment sits a dark light well surrounded by service rooms, a typical feature of 1960s Athenian domestic architecture that has been left intact here.
The brief was to make the space liveable again with minimal intervention, keeping the spirit of the place and its fluid, interconnected sequence of rooms while still adapting it for how people live today. One of the few structural changes was opening the kitchen onto the dining room through a large window fitted with a countertop, so the two rooms can communicate with one another. The original kitchen cabinetry was not replaced but refurbished and reinstalled in its original position with modernist handles.
Throughout the apartment, the furniture, mirrors, and lighting were all sourced second-hand, largely from Athens’ flea market, reinforcing the lived-in, accumulated feel of the home. The original pale-yellow doors, windows, and shutters were repaired and put back exactly where they had always been. The period floral tiles in the kitchen and bathroom were kept, and even the built-in kitchen radio, a small but telling detail of the home’s history, was preserved in place.
The result is an apartment that reads as a genuine time capsule, one where, as the description goes, only the murmur of a radio broadcast is missing to complete the illusion of a home caught between past and present.
