Georgios Apostolopoulos Architects treats every wall in this Kifisia apartment as optional, replacing them with a system of joinery that can open the home up or shut it down, room by room. The Athens-based studio was brought in to rework an 80-square-meter apartment (861 square feet) inside a circular 1970s modernist block, a space that had spent years as a psychiatrist’s office before falling into disrepair. The result behaves less like a fixed floor plan and more like a set of settings, reconfigured depending on who is staying and what the day requires.
The renovation started with subtraction rather than addition. Every internal partition came down first, exposing the apartment’s original structure before a single new decision was made — a strategy that echoes the Lycabettus apartment renovation by Oikonomakis Siampakoulis, another 1970s apartment renovation in Athens that dissolved its original walls into one continuous space. What remained afterward was treated as the apartment’s essential form, organized only by the joinery elements introduced later to define use without enclosing it.
At the plan’s center, this Kifisia apartment turns its kitchen into the main social device, built around a curved island that houses every appliance the room needs. Rather than a room to pass through, it becomes an inhabited object that gathers cooking, working, and meeting around a single fixed point, with people free to approach and use it from any side. Around the island, freestanding furniture in the living and dining areas can shift position to alter how the space functions from one day to the next.
That continuity carries into the main bedroom, separated from the living area by a full-height unit that holds wardrobes and the apartment’s utilities, including air-conditioning. A pair of doors at either end can close the room off completely, or align with the depth of the unit until they all but disappear into the adaptable joinery itself. “The aim was to create a more fluid layout,” Apostolopoulos says, a home built to expand and contract with whoever is occupying it.
A vanity unit sits between two mirrored doors that conceal a shower room and a separate WC, spaces that once held a storage room and a second toilet before the renovation. The instinct to replace an entire room with a single working object rather than a wall recalls Nikos Kouklakis’s own home and studio in Chania, where a comparable piece of custom furniture absorbs kitchen, storage, and shelving into one continuous element.
At the opposite end of the plan, the idea of a second bedroom is replaced entirely by a flexible apartment layout device: a fold-down bed and a drop-down desk that let the space shift between sleeping, working, dining, or simply extending the living room, according to the day’s needs. Left open, the room reads as part of the main space; closed off with sliding doors that nest into the joinery, it becomes self-contained again.
Materials were kept deliberately restrained, fulfilling a client brief for a cave-like interior that keeps attention on the building’s original structure rather than on new finishes. Microcement runs underfoot throughout the home and continues onto its curved terrace, while a textured paint finish in the same tone was applied to both the walls and the joinery, so the new interventions read as part of the architecture rather than as objects added to it. It is this restrained monochrome interior that lets the apartment’s spatial choreography, rather than its material palette, carry the project.
One original feature survived the renovation intact in spirit, if not in form: a hearth in the living area, preserved from the apartment’s earlier life but altered from a decorative brick fireplace into a modern bio-ethanol version. Apostolopoulos studied architecture at The Bartlett in London, as well as at Oxford Brookes and Plymouth University, before founding his Athens architecture studio studio in 2022 — training that shows in a project more interested in systems of use than in any single decorative gesture.
Seen from outside the sliding doors and fold-down furniture, the apartment gives little away about how it is being used on any given day — the same circular apartment block it has always been, its capacity to become a different home for a different evening held quietly inside a piece of joinery no visitor would think to open.
Kifisia Apartment by Georgios Apostolopoulos Architects | Location: Kifisia, Athens, Greece — Year: 2026 — Key materials: microcement flooring, custom joinery, monochrome finishes