Total area: 80 sq.m.
Location: Kyiv, Ukraine
Architect: Sergey Makhno
Project status: completed in 2012
Photo: Andrey Avdeenko
This place is inhabited by all kinds of pandas — over 50 sweet panda teddies, porcelain, knitted, and drawn bears live here. It was not so much the panda collection though, as the collectors, a young creative family, that the interior design was created for. This apartment with its dark corners and long corridors used to be shared by several families. In order to make its 80 meters really useful, it was decided to bring down some walls replacing them with the necessary ones.
The result is an open common space combining the living/dining room and the kitchen with closed private areas of the bedroom, children’s room and bathroom. Interestingly, the bathroom was placed into a separate “black cube” almost smack in the middle of the living room. Black is abundant here — every room has at least one wall with a textured macabrecoloured finish. There is even one in the children’s room, while the bedroom boasts three of them. Yet, there is nothing fatal or aggressive about it: black feels amazingly fresh, mostly thanks to a combination of the black walls and white decoration of embossed plaster patterns and parquet strips. Black also serves as a perfect background for art — vibrant accents of Oleksa Mann’s paintings, Chinese ginger jars and Dmytro Grek’s patinated bronze sculptures.
