Tetris, bump studio‘s renovation of a 93 sqm (1,001 sq ft) apartment in Genoa, resolves a fragmented, non-parallel floor plan with a single custom yellow volume that folds through the entire living space. Founded in Genoa in 2022 by architects Giulio Massetani and Fabio Filippo, bump studio manages every stage of a project directly, from concept to construction, without defaulting to standardised solutions. The game the project takes its name from isn’t a branding flourish — it describes, fairly literally, how the apartment was put back together.
A layout with no straight lines is what bump inherited — the same starting condition faced by llabb’s Watchtower Apartment, another Genoa renovation built around resolving an irregular, inherited plan. Before the renovation, the 93 sqm apartment renovation featured a fragmented plan, its irregular rooms arranged around a central corridor — a configuration built for a sequence of separate spaces that no longer matched how the clients actually wanted to live, with contemporary domestic life increasingly calling for rooms that can adapt across different moments of the day rather than staying fixed to a single function.
One yellow volume, two jobs replaces that corridor logic entirely. The new layout brings visitors directly into a single open-plan living area, where a large custom yellow volume conceptually separates the living space from the kitchen — a bespoke-millwork approach not far from the oak millwork threading through llabb’s Surf House in Levanto, where a single continuous piece of furniture does comparable structural work. Its slightly folded geometry isn’t a stylistic flourish either: the fold exists specifically to reconcile two originally non-parallel walls — the room’s actual walls don’t run parallel to each other, and the volume’s bent form is what lets a single piece of furniture read as continuous across both. Its first section handles storage, incorporating a wardrobe and an entry console while concealing the door to the apartment’s more private areas.
A curtain instead of a wall forms the volume’s second half. Suspended from an existing beam, this section opens into shelving that hides a theatrical backdrop curtain in the same yellow as the furniture around it, letting the perception of space and light shift depending on whether it’s drawn or open. A yellow resin strip on the floor traces the volume’s exact footprint, turning what could have been a simple room divider into what Fabio Filippo calls a genuine threshold. “Tetris stems from the attempt to transform a complex geometry into a clear and intuitive living space,” Filippo said. “The yellow volume engages with the existing irregularities rather than concealing them, organising the layout and creating new relationships between the different environments.”
The kitchen’s real material sits behind that curtain. A sculptural island in Florim Sodalite cladding anchors the room with sharp, projecting geometries at its centre. Beyond housing the sink, dishwasher, and a large cantilevered snack counter, the island’s deep tone and the way it catches shifting daylight make it the room’s clear focal point — doing more compositional work than the actual cabinetry around it.
Deliberately quiet cabinetry is exactly what that surrounding cabinetry is built to be. The Cesar kitchen cabinetry running along the back wall stays chromatically neutral and skips overhead cabinets entirely, relying instead on plain surfaces and a single long shelf that lights the worktop while displaying a handful of objects. Past this understated run, a door concealed inside the yellow volume opens onto the circulation corridor serving the bedrooms, bathroom, and service areas.
A green room within the room describes the master bedroom’s real move. An ottanio green walk-in wardrobe is treated as a lowered sub-volume, its reduced height specifically calculated to preserve the continuity of the apartment’s existing decorative ceiling mouldings rather than cutting through them. Behind the bed, that same intense green functions as a headboard, giving the room a sense of enclosure; a circular porthole lets daylight reach into the dressing area beyond, keeping a visual link between the two spaces even when they’re functionally separate. When more privacy is needed, two curtains in matching green can seal off both the wardrobe’s entrance and its circular opening, turning it into a fully introspective space of its own.
Correcting geometry with tile is how the bathroom absorbs the apartment’s remaining irregularities. A new back wall carves out two bathroom niches — one for the washbasin, one for the shower — each finished in a different tone to read as a distinct chromatic zone, while two resin surfaces cross the room at different heights to form the washbasin counter and the shower tray. Giulio Massetani draws a direct line between this room and the kitchen: “The Tetris project emerges from bold colour contrasts and defined geometries: the kitchen island stands as a monolithic block, while in the bathroom the grid pattern of the niches seems to recreate a game board,” he said.
Colour versus geometry is the real tension Tetris leaves open. Whether an interlocking system this saturated in colour reads as considered architecture or as a strong aesthetic bet is a fair question — a monolithic blue island and a wall of yellow joinery photograph well today, but bold colour choices are also the first thing renovations tend to date by. The stronger case the project has to stand on isn’t the palette itself but the geometry underneath it: the fold that reconciles two non-parallel walls, the lowered volume that respects an existing ceiling, the niches that correct an irregular room. If that structural logic holds, the colour is a detail rather than the whole case — and it’s the fold, not the yellow, that will decide how Tetris ages.
Tetris by bump studio | Location: Genoa, Italy — Year: 2026 — Key materials: custom-lacquered yellow joinery, Florim Sodalite cladding, resin flooring, ottanio green wall paint