The brief one desk received for this single-story timber-frame house near Warsaw was unusual from the start: a couple working in film and television, a vast collection of art and vintage furniture, and four-legged residents who needed therapeutic calm above all else. Feluś, a one-eyed pug, and Kazimierz, a white-furred German Shepherd mix — both rescued from shelters — were the silent clients whose wellbeing shaped every decision. The result is a colorful residential interior in Hornówek that works as hard on the nervous system as it does on the eye.
The narrow plot and existing structure set the constraints. One desk found a timber-frame house already standing on a tight footprint surrounded by mature trees, and chose to work with the building rather than against it. A clear division between an intimate night zone and an open-plan living area gave the layout its logic. Roof skylights — scattered throughout — became the project’s most important atmospheric tool, flooding the interior with diffused natural light calibrated to produce exactly the kind of quiet that rescue animals need.
Color as therapy is not a decorative claim here but an operational one. The entrance hallway is wrapped entirely in feldgrau — a grey-green that one desk’s collaborating color specialist Olka Barczak describes as evoking moss, lichen, and organic forest matter. The effect is deliberately enveloping, shaded, intimate. A patterned tile floor in green and anthracite from French brand Winckelmans anchors the space, while a lacquered sunny-yellow bench provides the first chromatic jolt — the first signal that this house refuses monotony.
The hallway sets the contract. Wrapped entirely in feldgrau — a grey-green that color specialist Olka Barczak associates with moss, lichen, and organic forest matter — it functions as a decompression chamber before the chromatic intensity of the rest of the house begins. A patterned tile floor in green and anthracite from French brand Winckelmans anchors the space. Against this monochrome backdrop, a lacquered sunny-yellow bench with a wavy wooden backrest delivers the first chromatic jolt — the signal that what follows will not be restrained.
The open-plan living area — kitchen, lounge, and dining zone combined — opens entirely onto the garden and surrounding grove. The kitchen island in light quartz composite sits beneath an Arch lamp by Swedish brand Oblure, its semicircular form mirrored deliberately in the handmade terracotta tile pattern by Elisa Passino on the splashback. The oak veneer kitchen fronts in warm ginger tones anchor the room’s material warmth, while a bottle-green glazed Rombini fireplace by Italian brand Mutina closes the lounge end. The dining table — round, with a burgundy Forbo linoleum top — is surrounded by vintage chairs accumulated by the owners over years, including a classicist piece reputedly once occupied by Polish politician Jacek Kuroń.
The lounge and dining zones each operate with their own internal logic while remaining part of the same open field. The gray-navy Lazy corner sofa from IWC Home anchors the lounge between a tall oak bookcase and a bottle-green glazed Rombini fireplace by Italian brand Mutina, with Nelson lamps from Copenhagen-based Hay hanging overhead. The dining area — semi-private within the open plan — organizes itself around a large round table with a burgundy Forbo linoleum top, surrounded by vintage chairs gathered by the owners over years, including a classicist piece reputedly once occupied by Polish politician Jacek Kuroń.
The bedroom is a declaration. Turkish red on the ceiling — dense, pulsating, body-relaxing — holds a deliberate tension with Prussian blue on the stained wooden headboard panels, which is soothing and grounding. Terra verde wainscoting runs the full perimeter. A floor-to-ceiling ink-black curtain mediates between them all, capable of pulling total darkness into the room with a single gesture. The chromatic intensity of this Polish residential interior recalls the approach one desk took in their Warsaw projects — a willingness to let color do structural work rather than decorative work — and echoes the same conviction found in the Wes Anderson-inspired Kraków apartment by Butterfly Studio, where saturated palette choices similarly redefined spatial hierarchy.
The bathroom continues the geometric logic established in the hallway. A cream-and-brick checkerboard grid of Terratinta floor tiles anchors the room, above which a screen of vertical Sticks tiles from Raw Decor rises over two meters before dissolving into a terra verde ceiling. The shower, entered through custom blue pivot doors, features a semicircular bench in red Fusion quartzite — a material that reappears in the guest bathroom as a vanity countertop. The handcrafted tile bathroom design creates the kind of layered material richness that characterizes the best of contemporary Polish interior practice, visible also in Niunia Studio’s microcement and color work in their Kraków apartment.
The home office closes the night zone with an orange-framed window overlooking the access road. Below it sits a grass-green bench — described by the studio as the dogs’ favorite spot in the entire house. It is a detail that loops back to the project’s original premise: that the most considered residential interiors are the ones that resolve comfort for everyone inside them, regardless of the number of legs.