Apartment in Kifissia Reframes Modernist Roots with Lush Color
Apartment in Kifissia reworks a 1980s apartment in Kifisia, Greece, with a clear eye on its modernist bones and open plan. Panagiotis Papanikolaou Design Studio preserves the generous windows and original wood while threading in new color and material cues that echo the surrounding landscape. The result is an updated urban home that respects its past yet feels distinctly present.
Light spills across the original wooden floor, picking up the mellow grain and the subtle shift between old planks and new oak. Large windows stretch across the main apartment, framing trees and sky so that the landscape reads almost like a mural.
This apartment in Kifisia, Greece, sits within a 1980s building rooted in the ongoing modernist movement. Panagiotis Papanikolaou Design Studio treats it as a careful renovation rather than a reset, preserving the open plan and generous glazing while working through color and material. The project keeps the modernist structure intact and works instead through tones, surfaces, and tactile contrasts that tighten the connection between everyday life and the setting.
Color Maps The Plan
Color does real work here, not just decoration. Warm and cool tones mark out different zones, letting the open plan hold clear rhythms without heavy partitions that would cut views. In the living areas, deeper hues ground circulation routes, while lighter shades sit closer to the windows and keep the edge of the room engaged with the landscape. This chromatic mapping stays legible from morning to evening, so movement through the apartment picks up a quiet visual cadence.
Old Timber, New Oak
The project keeps the existing wooden floors and interior doors from the 1980s, retaining the texture and patina that tie the apartment to its era. New oak boards enter in the private areas, chosen to complement rather than compete, so old and new read as a single, continuous surface across bedrooms and circulation. Window frames remain in place, another nod to the original construction, and their depth reinforces the threshold between interior life and outdoor landscape. This steady presence of wood gives warmth to the modernist shell and anchors the shifting palette of color around it.
Living Room And Kitchen Dialogue
In the main living room, a custom wooden construction draws directly from the colors of the surrounding landscape. It picks up green and earth tones, echoing tree canopies and ground while staying tuned to the existing floorboard hue. The kitchen continues this dialogue between timber and tone, where wood doors sit against surfaces in both warm and cool shades, reinforcing the idea of balance rather than contrast. Cooking, dining, and lounging fall along one continuous volume, yet the shifts in texture and color give each activity a clear, legible setting.
Stone, Marble, And Quiet Rooms
The main bathroom takes a more neutral route so the view outside can carry more weight. Surfaces there lean on natural materials, with Naxos gray marble forming a calm base and cement-textured tiles recalling the project’s modernist origins. In the bedrooms, the palette softens again, with gentler colors and the continuity of oak underfoot linking rest to the natural surroundings beyond the glass. A neighboring apartment’s bathroom renovation extends these same principles, letting Thasos marble and European oak lead, so even a smaller room aligns with the broader material story.
Natural light returns as the final constant, brushing across marble, wood, and painted walls at different angles through the day. As sun and shadow move, they keep the relationship between materials and landscape in motion, reinforcing the quiet clarity of the renovation. The apartment stays rooted in its 1980s structure yet feels tuned to present rhythms, with color and material carrying most of the work.
Photography by Panagiotis Papanikolaou, Panagiotis Papanikolaou
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