A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Interior designer Marta Chrapka reinvents a prewar apartment in the heart of Warsaw, seamlessly combining elements of French style and Polish aesthetics.

Interior designer Marta Chrapka reinvents a prewar apartment located in the heart of Warsaw, seamlessly combining elements of French style and Polish aesthetics

“The owners really wanted a large, open kitchen, so we moved it from the back of the house to the front and combined the living, dining and kitchen areas” marta chrapka

Here’s the plot summary: a Francophile writer and his partner find their dream apartment, not just in their desired neighbourhood in the heart of Warsaw, but in the exact building in which they want to live. They hire an insightful and intuitive interior designer, Marta Chrapka of Colombe Design, who understands her clients’ tastes as well as she does the subtle and refined aesthetics of gracious prewar-apartment living in the Polish capital. She completely redesigns the home, crafting smart and stylish spaces that blend old and new. The project takes about six months, and so far, everyone is living happily ever after. Located in the heart of Warsaw, the Powisle district has lovely parks and a bustling bankside stretch of the Vistula River lined with cafes, shops and restaurants. The apartment owner, a writer of historical novels who spends part of the year abroad, had his eye on this very building, one of a pair of identical neoclassical structures built in 1931 by architect Feliks Michalski. In the neighbourhood, the buildings are well-known for their elegant mouldings and balconies, niceties that are in short supply in a city where little well-preserved prewar architecture remains. Unfortunately, renovations — the last occurring in the 1990s — had left the 96-squaremetre apartment a somewhat generic residence that could have been in any building anywhere in the world. Enter Chrapka to reinstate the past in a modern way. First, a gut renovation reconfigured all the spaces to suit the new owners’ needs and lifestyle. Next, she added plaster mouldings and skirting on the walls, as well as new herringbone parquet flooring and windows that recall the 1930s originals, to create a palpable echo of the building’s beloved details without resorting to slavish reproductions. Finally, through her deft decorating choices — some mid-century teak furniture here and up-to-the-minute 21st-century Italian lighting fixtures there — Chrapka created layers of objects and periods that subtly bring the apartment into the present.

“The owners really wanted a large, open kitchen, so we moved it from the back of the house to the front and combined the living, dining and kitchen areas,” Chrapka says. The work of 20th-century master Josef Frank inspired her design for the custom kitchen cabinets with circular walnut accents, and the dining room chairs are Frank’s own design for Svenskt Tenn, the Swedish design powerhouse he led mid-century.

Also from the mid-20th century is the living room’s fantastical brass Rhubarb lamp, which the designer picked up at an antiques store. The spectacular wraparound teak, marble and brass cabinet and desk is Chrapka’s own design.

Among the challenges of configuring and furnishing the different spaces was the fact that almost every room has one diagonal wall. In the bedrooms, where this could pose the biggest problems for placing the beds, Chrapka used built-in cabinets to ‘straighten’ the rooms and provide cosy nooks for the beds. William Morris wallpaper enhances the guestroom and, in the main bedroom, the cabinets provide much-needed storage utility and visual focal point. Chrapka created a separation between the public and private spaces of the house — or ‘day’ and ‘night’ zones, in her own parlance — with a pair of gorgeous walnut and glass doors. Their design motif was derived from similar doors in Kraków rather than Warsaw. “The owner is from Kraków, and I wanted to give him a visual link to that heritage,” Chrapka says. She used another door — this one in the intimately scaled second bedroom, which occupies the former kitchen space in the back of the apartment — to pay homage to the owner’s passion for French culture. Here, she added a chic oval porthole window to a closet door that provides a peekaboo glimpse of the piles and piles of books within.

Such attention to detail and emphasis on being attuned to a client’s interests and taste are important to Chrapka. “Here in Warsaw right now, everyone is ripping everything out of older buildings and throwing it all away. Instead of creating a generic — and fake — ‘French effect’, I want to give my clients design details that are right for the space but, more importantly, right for them,” she says.