A Greek Apartment Relearns to Breathe

Oikonomakis Siampakoulis renovates an Athens apartment for two art curators, unifying open-plan living around bespoke metal structures, terrazzo floors, and natural light. 

When Oikonomakis Siampakoulis Architects were asked to renovate an eighty-five-square-metre apartment at the foot of Lycabettus Hill in Athens, the brief arrived unusually well prepared. The clients—both working at the intersection of art and communication—had assembled a document so precise, by the architects’ own account, that it felt almost curatorial.

They lived surrounded by things: an expanding collection of artworks and design objects, inherited furniture with histories of its own, and the steady accumulation of souvenirs from frequent travel. They cooked seriously, and they brought things back. What they wanted was not less of this, but a way for it all to coexist without tipping into storage, and for the apartment—an unremarkable 1970s two-bedroom flat tucked between Exarchia and Kolonaki—to register, quietly but unmistakably, as something of the present.

Key to organising this open-plan space was to design and insert bespoke elements, and let domestic life flow around them.

The architects' first move was structural. Removing the longitudinal partition walls that divided the interior into separate rooms opened the apartment to its own depth, drawing natural light from the north-east facing bedroom and study room through two newly installed transom windows all the way to the south-west facing living areas. What had been a sequence of enclosed spaces became a single fluid volume — sitting area, dining room, kitchen, and entryway unified into one interconnected field, organised not by walls but by a series of bespoke interventions designed to anchor domestic life without constraining it.

Chief among these is the kitchen island — large, tiled, and positioned as a transitional centrepiece between cooking and dining — whose lower periphery conceals hand-crafted marble shelves for appliances, cookbooks, and artworks. A suspended white metal structure above it casts an interplay of light and shadow across the boundary between kitchen and dining room. At the entrance, a second white metal structure was fabricated directly around a preserved section of original brick wall, creating a display framework for the residents' art at the first moment of arrival.

Throughout, the original brown marble and colourful terrazzo floors were preserved and restored rather than replaced, as was the old carved marble sink — material decisions that root the renovation firmly in a stated ambition: to articulate what the architects describe as a quintessentially contemporary Greek aesthetic, one that acknowledges the country's multicultural diversity and its recently recovered design heritage without sentimentality. The apartment holds its collection, catches its light, and makes room for a life organised around cooking, art, and the accumulation of things worth keeping.

Key takeaways

• Oikonomakis Siampakoulis Architects removed the apartment's longitudinal partition walls and introduced two transom windows to draw natural light deep into the interior, transforming a sequence of enclosed 1970s rooms into a single, fluid open-plan space unified from entryway to living area.
• The design is organised around bespoke interventions rather than conventional furniture — a tiled kitchen island with hand-crafted marble shelves, a suspended white metal structure defining the kitchen-dining boundary, and a metal hallway display frame fabricated directly around a preserved section of original brick wall.
• Rather than replacing the apartment's original material features, the practice restored and integrated the brown marble floors, colourful terrazzo, and carved marble sink into the renovation, anchoring the scheme in what they describe as a quintessentially contemporary Greek aesthetic that honours recently overlooked design heritage.