Duplex apartment with private entrance

Maksim Loskutov

A duplex apartment with a terrace and private entrance

• Architecten

A duplex apartment mimics a countryside lifestyle — even more so if it boasts a terrace facing a garden in the courtyard and a private street entrance. The duplex layout is perfect for vertical zoning, where conventional division into guest or public areas and inner private space is achievable at different heights. The duplex follows this design with a hallway, toilet, kitchen/living room and a study, easily transformable into a guest room on the ground floor and a children’s bedroom, a spacious bathroom and a master bedroom sitting upstairs. Maximising privacy, the layout opts for diversity in household arrangements.

photo_credit Maksim Loskutov — Maksim Loskutov

With a ground-floor location, the apartment features a private entrance and a spacious terrace. The private porch secures maximal privacy, resulting in a 'house within the house' effect: a person living in a block of flats will have minimal interaction with their neighbours.

Double height, providing uninterrupted space between the lower and upper floors, is a signature of the layout. The six-metre high glazing creates a prime architectural and aesthetic feature, enhancing the vertical dimension and unifying the space, making it airier, and flooding the rooms with natural light. The double volume area becomes an accent in the apartment. Here, the focal point is the dining room, with a sizeable round table and bright chairs to sit the whole family, likely to act as the chief conceptual space of the lower floor interior. Its close positioning to the terrace door transforms it into an outdoor feature in summer.

The staircase, conceived as the second dominant feature, is another space focus. The concrete stairs are plastered and covered with timber panes, lined with a matching wooden bannister. The closed storage area under the staircase accommodates a shelved cupboard with room for throws, pillows, books, or even bottles of wine.

The lower floor design illustrates flexible zoning with a sliding door to divide the hallway from the corridor, a rotating partition wall between the passageway and the dining room, and a spacious window in the kitchen, detaching it from other spaces and retaining noise and smell inside. The interior is versatile and vibrant, allowing for change and new experiences. The upper floor zoning, where the children’s and parental bedrooms stand apart, is provisional. The master bedroom comprises a bed, a wardrobe with a changing room and a dressing table. It gives into an open balcony. A spacious bathroom and a laundry room are central to the upper floor.

The apartment interior embraces the artistic line of porches and urban villa architecture, combining a modern vision of modernism and Scandinavian design. The stylistic idea complements the space and layout planning by enriching its structure and adding a new perspective. The essential colour scheme features warm honey hues in timber against the background of walls in white and light grey and bright accented details: red, terracotta brown, and dark green in textile and ceramics. An original interior element is the lower floor ceiling, veneered with wood, which promotes a cosy and immersive environment.