© Caramel
Indoors

Charming and Chic

Cool, but not cold. Monochrome but not monotonous. Understated but not plain. In this inner city flat in Vienna, you can confidently say goodbye to traditional pairs of concepts. Just as Caramel Architekten have said goodbye to traditional room concepts, making it easier for the building contractors to dispense with quite a number of ideas.

© Tischlerei Mayerhofer / www.katsey.org
© Tischlerei Mayerhofer / www.katsey.org
© Caramel
© Caramel
© Caramel

Lively and colourful – that's the image that Vienna's second district wants to portray. Leopoldstadt has reinvented itself as a highly desirable area, with contemporary-style residential projects like the "Viertel Zwei" drawing people in with the promise of urban green living. The green element is provided by the large park known as the "Prater". Numerous attractive projects have been initiated in the area around Vienna's largest recreation facility, which is right in the heart of the city. That's why a small but very special stroke of genius created by Caramel Architekten. has been given the name "Fesch am Prater" (meaning "Chic by the Prater"). The fact that a project not only makes sense, is focused on solutions and is authentic, but also manages to be "chic" is especially important to the creative team who work with Günter Katherl, Martin Haller and Ulrich Aspetsberger: architecture should be fun! Enthusiasm and joy are factors that unite the planners and the people who later live in their properties. And so it was with the design of this loft apartment in a new building.

Room boxes

Being involved in a project from such an early stage is of course the dream of any interior designer: "This meant that in some areas we were able to make changes to the plans for the layout," Martina Hatzenbichler from Caramel Architekten tells us. A dominant component of the loft apartment is a long, tube-like corridor with a total of seven doors opening onto it. Caramel Architekten improved this not-so-chic arrangement by redesigning the walls to become room boxes. And they did this through the installation of floor-to-ceiling doors and the consistent use of one material: elm was used throughout, from the corridor right through to the cupboard in the living room. The elegant colour of the wood provides almost the only splash of colour – apart from the plants that remind us of the green of the Prater – as the colour palette used for the flat is otherwise strictly black and white.

Shadow play

When it came to implementing their solution, which uses light and shadow to achieve an almost graphic look, Caramel were once again able to draw on the expertise of the Mayerhofer Carpentry Workshop from Chorherrn in Lower Austria. Junior Manager Claudia Mayerhofer, who succeeded in establishing the company as part of the creative scene with her design project "Die Hantel", designed all the interior fittings in close coordination with the building contractors and the team at Caramel. For this project, she once again decided to use paints and coatings from ADLER: the furniture in the bedroom, the corridor, the bathroom, the hallway and the sliding doors were painted an elegant white using ADLER Pigmopur in shade RAL 9016. The stained black MDF boards used for the cupboards and shelves were given a transparent protective coating – with ADLER Legnopur G50.

Heirlooms

The fixtures and fittings become a part of the room. The magic word here is reduction: a number of items of furniture could be dispensed with and likewise the wooden floor that had initially been favoured by the residents – instead, a smaller number of pieces could be perfectly showcased: kinetic wooden sculptures and treasured heirlooms and mementos found a deserving home in the new spaces, as did the family themselves.

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