Rublevo
Mother Nature did most of work for us in this project. We simply added a carefully chosen set of designer furniture, vintage and décor items and materials and, of course, works of art to the beautiful natural landscape you can rarely find in the city. We put all our heart and soul in this project receiving a cart blanche from our customers although that was our first project together.
Year: 2020
Country: Russia
City: Moscow
Space: 170 square metres
Works of art are particularly important here. For instance, we commissioned a grass and flower painting in the living room from Vera Martynov when we went to her solo exhibition in the Myth gallery in Saint Petersburg. It is a part of her Song of Songs series and she used the same technique here. Her paints are based on natural pigments including red Pompeian soil, ochre, terra umber, burnt sienna, egg yolk and white wine. We placed a 1950s water color panel from Japan on the wall above the bed in the bedroom. Flamboyant ceramic lamps designed by Sergey Makhno from Ukraine will definitely catch your eye in the dining room and the bedroom. Brutalist ceramic items by Marina Akilova are all over the place. Angular wood and cast iron pieces look quite unusual – we found them at a flee market in Paris. We transformed these former casting moulds into real art objects.
A number of architectural details can also be considered works of art. For instance, a fireplace with a huge boulder stone in the living room based on our design. In fact, it is hollow – that was a huge challenge for the workers but they did it. Or an impressive textured wooden wall which hides the entrance to the dressing room and the storage room becoming a design accent wall in the dining room and the kitchen. The craftsmen who built it fastidiously carved the ornament manually removing thin layers of wood. The wall reminds us of traditional Japanese woodcarving techniques, and it is a true object of art. The kitchen furniture décor is a mix of coarse finish and aged oak veneer. All the walls of the apartment are decorated with naturally colored microcement coating which we later manually made uneven.
One of the most important designing solutions helped us to add another 40 square meters to the interior surface area of the apartment. We reduced one of the terraces to a small balcony for BBQs and enlarged the kitchen and the dining room. The owners can always access the other and bigger terrace from their bedroom, study or the children’s room and enjoy the green Moscow landscape. As a result we developed an interior which is close to nature, frugal but aesthetically pleasing and quite meditative.
