KPS_M Apartment | RARE Office

Located in Friedrichshain, the building KPS is an "Altbau" ( residential building of the early '900).
As many of the Berlin buildings in the former East Berlin, it underwent the so called “emergency renovation” in the time from the WWII and right after the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

In 2012, it still presented shared bathrooms at mezzanine levels: the building underwent a full renovation from 2012 to 2014, led by the office Planstadt Architekten. 

RARE Office has been commissioned to renovate the apartment at the 2nd level of the building facing the street. 
The apartment presented a typical berlin floorplan with all room revolving around an entrance corridor with no window.
The bathroom, presented a lowered ceiling, due to the presence of the old bathrooms at the mezzanine floor of the building’s staircase. 
In sequence, kitchen, a storage room and the bedroom followed along the corridor, counter faced by a large living room, another bedroom and another small room.

The client required the division of the property in two units: KPS_L and KPS_M.

Aim of the project is to open the space as much as possible, allowing more light into the apartments.

In the KPS_M unit, bathroom and kitchen have been allocated within the original partition of the apartment and enriched with strong colors and materials. 

 Although it's a studio, a functional organization has been achieved by the introduction of a lowered ceiling equipped with a system of curtains and by designing a piece of furniture that can be used both the sleeping and the living areas. Rest material from the original wooden floor (Dielung) has been reused for the construction of the bathroom cabinets.