apartment with a total area of ​​95 m2 (Moscow) Peter Kostelov

Passing the gallery

A photo: Zinon Rasudinov

Interview prepared: Natalya Sedyakina

Architect: Peter Kostelov

Magazine: N10 (77) 2003

All ingenious is simple. This statement does not lose its relevance for thousands of years. Another confirmation it received in the apartment on Malaya Bronnaya, designed by architect Peter Kostelov. Nothing more, because the main object of the interior is the man himself. And the main decorative material is ordinary plywood.SALON: Let's talk about planning: what has changed? - Literally everything. Initially, it was a flat standard apartment, with a total area of ​​95 square meters. meters, traditionally with two entrances - black and front. In general, a typical apartment of old Moscow. I divided it into two halves horizontally and still in half vertically. Horizontally, this functional division. A smaller part of the apartment (about 40 meters) was given to the personal chambers of the owners, and the remaining, most of them - under the guest area. Vertical apartment is divided by means of multi-level floors. That is, the longitudinal part of the area, which occupies exactly half of both the guest and residential zones, rises 60 cm above the second, smaller one. Private chambers unite the bedroom with its own bathroom and an office that has access to the black staircase. The guest part includes a large living room, a dining room with a kitchen and - a vertical partitioning element - a bar counter under which TV and audio equipment is installed. The podium formed as a result of raising the levels is extremely functional: part of the podium is used as a base for supplying communications, and the second part serves as a storage system — drawers are built in from the office, bathroom, and living room under the podium.S: Was it your idea to offer the customer such an uneasy interior? - The customer saw one of my interiors, published a few years ago in the magazine Salon, and wanted something similar.S: That is, do you adhere to the same style both in solving the interior space and in the choice of materials? - It's not about style, but in relation to life in general. If we talk about the interior as a social phenomenon, then that period of time, when the interiors wore a representative function of “declare oneself”, of a certain status, lasted for a rather long time. And in a sense, still not over. For me, it is always very important with minimal means to reveal the maximum possibilities of a given space - both in the planning and in the decoration - so that the brightest person in it remains.S: But this is a very large semantic load on a person. Do your customers withstand such a serious burden of responsibility? - Everyone with whom I work, in the first place, are extraordinary personalities. The order of such an interior is a confirmation of a certain path traveled from the desire to decorate the walls of the house with brocade and Venetian plaster to the realization that all this is ultimately tinsel. And in this interior there are no attempts to decorate something, someone like it.S: How did the idea of ​​just such an apartment decoration appear - The idea to use natural materials - stone, metal, plywood, glass, wood - is of course not new. Plywood, for example, has long been used in the construction and decoration of houses and apartments. The basis of such decisions is in the priority of simple "honest" materials over imitators that carry excessive decorativeness.S: That is, in this case, the simplicity of the material emphasizes the purity of the idea? - Well, she doesn’t cross it, at least. Although a lot of effort is behind the apparent simplicity: the apartment was designed and built for almost two years. In addition, it is generally quite expensive, since it requires highly skilled and rather painstaking work.S: Can your project be ambitious? - Not. This attitude to the organization and decoration of the interior is absolutely natural for me, for the landlord, and for the people I work with now.S: The organization of the space of this apartment has a reference to the eastern, one might say, Buddhist worldview. What is Buddhism through minimalism? - Rather restrained constructivism. The stylistic serenity of space helps a person to focus on his own inner world.Peter Kostelov: “Many guests in this house and now still ask the owner, stroking the plywood wall:“ Everything is fine, and what are you going to trim the walls? ” to create an interior where the most important and bright element would be a man. "