Project Name: Apartment Conversion into a Creative Studio

Location: Bratislava, Slovakia

Design Team: alchitekt

Floor Area: 85 m² (915 ft²)

Year of Completion: 2025

Photography: Matej Hakár

Design Features: Slovak architecture practice alchitekt has converted a top-floor apartment in a 1928 Bratislava landmark into a flexible creative studio, revealing the building's raw structural soul in the process. Situated within a historic building designed by celebrated Slovak architect Juraj Tvarožek, the 85-square-metre studio navigates the tension between preservation and reinvention with quiet confidence. The most defining move of the project was the painstaking restoration of the building's reinforced concrete ceiling beams, which had been buried beneath decades of plaster. Uncovered and celebrated, these branching structural elements now anchor the entire spatial composition, sloping gently upward toward the facade and lending the interior an almost geological sense of depth and time.

Rather than compete with the visual weight of the exposed ceiling, alchitekt introduced a deliberately light-touch material palette. Glass partitions, tubular steel furniture, and suspended raw painter's canvases work in concert to divide the space without enclosing it, maintaining a sense of openness and continuity throughout. LED strips concealed along the flanks of the outer beams cast soft, indirect light across the walls, transforming the ceiling's complexity into an atmospheric asset.

The studio is organised into two zones defined by floor colour: a white area for meetings and presentations, and a gray zone for hands-on creative production, where desks on wheels allow the layout to shift with the demands of each project. Full-grown indoor plants mounted on wheeled platforms further dissolve the boundaries between furniture and architecture.

Perhaps the project's most poetic gesture is its upcycled faucet: old gas pipes discovered during demolition were welded together into a long ceiling-mounted tap, turning industrial archaeology into functional design. It is a detail that perfectly encapsulates alchitekt's ethos, finding beauty precisely where history left its mark.

Design Team: Alchitekt is an independent architectural practice established in Bratislava, Slovakia, around 2019 and currently led by principal architect Andrea Lizáková. Born in 1990, Lizáková brings a distinctly international academic formation to her practice: trained at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, the Umeå School of Architecture in Sweden, and the Moscow Institute of Architecture, she subsequently spent three years at Kengo Kuma and Associates in Tokyo, where she developed a rigorous sensitivity to material honesty, tactile spatial quality, and the contextual integration of structure and detail.

These formative professional experiences are legible throughout alchitekt's built work. The practice operates across architectural renovation, interior design, and bespoke spatial interventions, consistently demonstrating disciplined restraint in material selection and studied attentiveness to existing building fabric. Rather than imposing formal expression onto inherited structures, alchitekt privileges dialogue between historical context and contemporary intervention, allowing latent spatial and structural qualities to inform and generate new design logic.

Lizáková's guiding design principles, honest materiality, the considered deployment of natural light, and the contextual coherence of spatial concepts, manifest as a cohesive methodological framework across projects at varying scales. Alchitekt's output reflects a practice grounded in the conviction that architecture emerges most persuasively not from formal imposition, but from attentive reading of what already exists. Andrea Lizáková served as lead architect for this project with full principal involvement throughout.