Author's Apartment

Author's Apartment is a space designed for himself by the architect Adam Wiercinski. From the beginning of his activity, the designer focused on complete design, complementing his own projects with the author's furniture, custom architectural elements and details that affect the unique character of the place. These are a single series of objects made in cooperation with local craftsmen from honest materials such as steel, solid wood or stone. Working on a different scale, from small lamps through buildings, allows him to better experience and understand space. It was similar in the case of the design and renovation of his own apartment in a tenement house from 1932.

First, old elements such as wooden floors or solid doors with deep door frames were restored. The function was re-arranged between the existing structural walls so that the kitchen was part of the open living space and a meeting place. Minimal interference in the partition walls resulted in brightening the dark corridor with the western sun. Bright, natural floors and neutral white walls served as a background for the original furnishings supplemented with several inherited elements.

The apartment is filled with forty individual objects designed by Adam. The original furniture creates a coherent interior space despite the different functions and scale. The main material used by Wiercinski is steel in various profiles and finishes, from raw to painted or waxed. The designed elements are characterized by modesty, simplicity and proportional treatments drawn from architectural experience. The visible, intersecting structure is often supplemented with solid wood, glass and natural stone. These are the features that define the author's constantly developing design language. In this project, the use of boards, which are standardly used by carpenters, was abandoned. The wood appears here in the form of solid, natural and waxed oak and black oiled plywood. These materials, together with steel, stone, natural linen or simple ceramic tiles, do not pretend to be anything. They are honest in their simplicity and show the beauty of the material used in cross-section. This is a project based on combining individual elements into an original, coherent and calm whole. “Almost everything” is individually designed here, from large furniture, partition walls containing a wardrobe to small details.

The kitchen furniture is an original steel frame raised above the historic parquet floor, divided into square modules. The division of the kitchen into squares makes it non-standard and deviates from the typical kitchen by creating a large piece of furniture that fits the room. Other functionally important elements are the steel partition wall in the corridor with a wardrobe, which lets in daylight between two opposite areas of the apartment. Another wall “captured in the frame” is the element separating the bathtub with a shower in the bathroom. In a small, narrow space, it was possible to maintain the functionality and comfort of individual elements. The culmination of the corridor, already in the bedroom, is another frame filled with plywood, which visually closes the space of the wardrobe. This place also consists of designed pipes and shelves covered with linen fabric. The following are designed in this apartment: a table with a characteristic flower plate; coffee tables; a sofa with a visible structure on the outside; an oak shelf on one leg; a series of stools/mirrors, lamps using lampshades from a Polish glassworks and combined with Wiercinski's steel structures; shelves; curtain rods; neon installations, and even small details such as covers for damaged doors around locks or buttons in the toilet. In addition to the author's elements, there are several inherited antique furniture pieces in the apartment. Some of them have also been modified in Adam's style. A wooden chest of drawers from my grandmother gained a steel base, creating a new piece of furniture in terms of expression, and an original Danish ceiling lamp was transformed into a floor lamp by a new, steel structure. Each of the elements has its own story to tell, but all of them were created at the same time and create a consistent, original story. This apartment has become a space for testing its own furniture and details for its creator.

Lead Architect: Adam Wiercinski