Apartment DFP by AKT.studio
Apartment DFP converts an attic apartment in Brixen, Italy into a clear, open loft shaped by light and measured surfaces. Designed by AKT.studio in 2024, the project reorders daily life around the path of the sun, pulling social rooms toward views and tucking quieter zones into sheltered corners. A restrained palette of wood, stone, metal, and textiles gives the interior a calm, continuous rhythm that still reads as distinctly domestic.
Light slips along spatula-finished ceilings and picks up the grain of fir, then falls to rest on travertine and oak. A green entry threshold wraps floor and suspended ceiling, announcing a clear shift from stairwell to interior.
This attic apartment in Brixen, Italy becomes an open loft, reorganized as a legible sequence of rooms shaped by daylight and material contrast. AKT.studio treats the former compartmentalized volume as a single living landscape, cutting and carving just enough to bring light deep inside. The project hinges on interior palette and built-in elements, which quietly mark use, mood, and hierarchy.
The apartment now reads as a calm, continuous environment where living and dining drift toward the brightest edge and more private rooms withdraw to quieter zones. Material changes, shifts in height, and tailored furniture volumes define each area, so residents move through a clear order without hard breaks. Surfaces stay few, honest, and tactile, allowing the changing light to do much of the visual work.
Staging Light and Daily Life
Targeted demolitions open the former attic into a generous loft, yet the structural frame stays legible. Living and dining move to the side where daylight and views carry the greatest weight, encouraging lingering at the table or sofa. Retreat rooms and secondary functions slip into more secluded pockets, buffered from the activity at the heart of the plan. This hierarchy feels intuitive, as if daily routines simply follow the route of the sun.
Generous openings and terraces act as light catchers, drawing brightness deep into the apartment and setting up long sightlines. As the day advances, light tracks across ceilings and walls, activating the finishes rather than fighting them. The result stays dynamic but never restless, because the surfaces are tuned to hold both sharp and soft shadows.
Carpeted Threshold and Loft Order
Arrival happens in a precise gesture: entrance floor and suspended ceiling are fully wrapped in a carefully chosen green carpet. This immersive surface tightens the proportions, creating a defined antechamber before the loft opens out. Color and texture do the zoning here, absorbing sound and lending a gentle tactility underfoot.
From that threshold, built-in furniture begins to organize the loft. Varying heights and depths of cabinetry and storage volumes create subtle partitions without solid walls. Some elements rise to meet the roofline, others sit low and long, all contributing to a sense of plasticity that guides movement. The apartment gains order through these inhabitable pieces rather than through closed doors.
Wood, Stone, and Steel by Zone
A restrained palette anchors each functional area while holding the apartment together. Naturally finished white fir and raw stainless steel define the living and dining rooms, setting up a dialogue between warm grain and cool reflection. Travertine shapes the kitchen, giving work surfaces a grounded, tactile presence that can take daily use. In the bathrooms, Laas marble introduces a finer texture and a more intimate scale, tuned to water, steam, and bare feet.
Bedrooms lean into softness. Warm linen, regional South Tyrolean loden, and Swiss pine line these quieter rooms, changing the acoustics and the touch of every surface. Large-format oak planks run throughout, emphasizing the length of the rooms and tying these distinct material zones into a single, serene whole. Under changing daylight the oak shifts tone, registering time as gently as a clock.
Surfaces That Catch Light
Walls and ceilings finished with a spatula technique respond directly to light and shadow, catching raking sun in fine strokes. When clouds move in, the same surfaces flatten, allowing wood and stone to take visual precedence. Built-ins and floorboards extend toward terraces, so interior and exterior views read as one continuous depth. Even without bold color, the material grain and surface relief give the loft a quiet, always shifting character.
By day, terraces and openings pull in light and air; by evening, the interior palette gathers the room back to its essentials. Oak, fir, stone, fabric, and steel hold the memory of the sun after it drops. Apartment DFP shows how a lean selection of materials, placed with care, can turn an attic into a generous loft tuned to both routine and light.
Photography by Gustav Willeit
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