More or Less Straight

In the nineteenth century, attics of apartment buildings had many purposes. They were used for drying clothes, storing junk and furniture, and for checking and repairing the roof covering and truss structures. But attics had one thing in common. They were not intended for living.

Nowadays, we have little space in cities and we protect our roof landscape from the outside, so we are already moving into attics. We are technologically capable of doing this, but the main problem remains the same: Space limits. Sloping ceilings, stubborn structural elements that, despite all efforts, can never be completely eliminated, chimneys and walled-off skylights. How to make an attic habitable when everything is usually crooked and impractical?

We also faced this task. Right from the beginning of the design work, it became clear that everything here was outside the standard building plan, everything was crooked, including the roof plane itself, which formed a collapsed surface. In the attic, precision and parallelism were no longer important when building. So we accepted it as our own and whatever was more or less crooked, we dealt with more or less straight. We used the unadaptable curves as the genetic code of the interior, which we also wrote into several specific situations, such as the fairing above the kitchen or the cut of the mirrors, but also into several practical details, such as ventilation of the dressing rooms by milling in the plinths. We underlined the straightness of the defiant disposition with a kitchen island and a massive table top, turned together into the open space. Simply where it is best to dine between the chimneys and sloping ceilings. We solved the problem of limited entry space by inserting a massive entrance cabinet without a ceiling, playing the role of a hallway and a dressing room.

The interior displays photographs and graphic works by artist Tereza Severová.