Interior of the apartment in Letná

A hundred years old house in Prague's Letná designed by architect Bohumil Hypšman. A large apartment filled with light from the bay window onto the street. Beautiful historical details fading alongside the rough modifications from the sixties and seventies. Owners with a sense for beauty and admiration for old beautiful things, and above all, with the determination to invest not only finances but also dozens of hours of hard work into their new home.

The goal of the renovation was to create a modern interior with the charm of old times. This was achieved through careful restoration of all historical elements, such as doors, handles, or stucco on the ceiling, and by choosing new elements (bookshelf, kitchen) that, through their simplicity, highlight the old and distinctive features present in the apartment, or those the owners lovingly sourced from antique shops or rescued from dumpsters.

The only significant layout change was moving the kitchen from a smaller room in the courtyard to the front part of the apartment and connecting it with the dining room, which corresponds to today's living style. Other changes (moving the washer and boiler from the bathroom to the pantry, expanding the passage between the dining room and the living area) also made the apartment more logical to use.

The spacious hall received a new cement floor that evokes at first glance the atmosphere of houses from the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, complemented by a beautiful antique mirror. The bathroom and toilet have been newly furnished, adorned with the same flooring as in the hall. Above the lowered ceiling of these rooms, a storage space was created, accessible from the hall.

The kitchen with dining area and living room - originally two "parlor rooms" facing the street, one of them with a bay window - immediately captivates with its magnificent stucco ceilings. The owners deserve enormous admiration for the dogged determination with which they spent dozens of hours sitting cross-legged on a cabinet, cleaning the ornaments hidden under layers of later paint with a wet sponge.

The new kitchen cabinetry is simple, white, with a predominance of horizontal lines. Together with the very light gray shade of the paint, it creates a subtle background for the room's centerpiece - the original ceiling. What initially seemed like a fatal flaw - the exhausted electrical wiring for the chandelier outlet in the center of the room, which could not be replaced to preserve the stucco - led to an original solution, the ceiling lighting from below in the four corners of the room. By day, the beautiful stuccos, in the evening, become truly magical.

The passage between the dining room and living room has been widened, and the door frames are made exactly according to the originals. The bookshelf is custom-designed to span the entire passage wall of the room, and like the kitchen, it aims to avoid drawing attention to itself, which belongs to the refurbished furniture from the 1940s and a painting by Lucie Skřivánková. The atmosphere of the room in the evening is completed by lighting the spines of the books from the shelves of the library.