Czech Ambassador Apartment

The Czech Ambassador apartment sits on an upper floor of a new-build residential block at ul. Seminaryjna 10 in Bydgoszcz, with views across mature trees and the traditional red-brick residential fabric of the surrounding neighbourhood. The apartment was commissioned by Dariusz "Darek" Zimny — son of the Czech Ambassador in Poland — through a referral that reached rise.design beyond the local architectural community into diplomatic networks. At 56.82 square metres, the programme is compact: a living room with kitchen annexe, bedroom, bathroom, and entrance corridor. The project was received in developer shell condition — raw concrete screed floors, rough plaster walls, bare ceilings with exposed electrical wiring, no interior finishes of any kind. Everything visible in the finished apartment was designed, specified, and installed from scratch.

The design concept evolved through three distinct moodboard directions presented in July 2022. The first explored a bold navy blue scheme — blue corridor, blue-toned bedroom accent wall, beige-and-charcoal palette throughout. The second moved toward sage green and olive, pairing a green sofa and bathroom vanity with terrazzo flooring and concrete-effect walls. The third proposed dramatic dark charcoal with gold and brass accents, a slatted bookshelf living wall, and a moody stone bathroom. Rather than committing to any single direction, the final design distilled the strongest element from each: the sage green became the apartment's signature kitchen wall colour, the dark moody palette became the bathroom's identity, and the warm neutral base running through all three options became the unifying thread for the bedroom and living zones. This hybrid decision — extracting the best note from each moodboard rather than following one — defines the apartment's character of restrained sophistication across a small floor plate.

The spatial planning process was equally deliberate. Five layout options were developed and compared before the final arrangement was selected — and crucially, the final plan went beyond rearranging furniture within the fixed structural walls. It reconfigured the bedroom-to-corridor partition to shrink the bedroom slightly, enlarge the entrance corridor to accommodate full-height built-in storage, and unlock access to a second balcony that none of the five initial variants had considered. The trade-off sacrificed 1.7 square metres of bedroom area but gained a functional entrance wardrobe wall and an additional 2.72 square metres of outdoor space — a spatial decision that improves the apartment's everyday performance over its visual appearance on paper.

The apartment's design is organised around sage green as a single chromatic signature. Applied to the living room feature wall, it repeats in the kitchen's three-dimensional fluted tile backsplash, creating a continuous chromatic thread that ties the open-plan social zone together across its two functional areas. The green is warm and restrained — closer to a natural mineral pigment than a saturated accent — and it gives the apartment its particular atmosphere of calm within a compact footprint. The fluted tile extends the tactile language of the colour into three dimensions, the vertical channelling catching light differently as the kitchen's working surfaces shift its quality through the day. FENIX nanotech matte laminate surfaces appear throughout the joinery — in the kitchen cabinetry, bedroom wardrobes, and bathroom vanity — their soft-touch, anti-fingerprint surface providing a cohesive premium feel that unifies the apartment's built-in elements without drawing attention to the material itself.

The bedroom is resolved through material restraint and precision joinery: FENIX matte laminate wardrobes in dark tones flank the sleeping zone, their tactile surface absorbing rather than reflecting light. A symmetrical headboard arrangement with an LED-lit recessed niche provides the room's primary architectural moment. Reeded glass wardrobe doors filter ambient light through the bedroom's storage wall, maintaining visual lightness in a compact room while separating the wardrobe zone from the sleeping area without a hard partition. Floor-to-ceiling curtain tracks run the full width of the window wall, the dual system of heavy beige drapes and sheer white curtains providing complete light control in an upper-floor room where morning light would otherwise be unmanageable.

The bathroom is the apartment's most spatially deliberate room. The entire volume — walls and ceiling both — is painted in a deep dark chocolate tone, creating a total cocoon that removes the room from the apartment's neutral base palette and gives it an identity of complete immersive enclosure. Handmade Equipe terracotta tiles in two distinct formats compose the wall surface: fluted ribbed tiles on the lower wall zone create dramatic vertical texture, while flat tiles in a stacked bond pattern occupy the upper zone, the transition between them marked by a horizontal LED strip that glows as a continuous luminous seam. A third tile variant — a thin accent strip — provides material punctuation at the junctions between zones. A backlit terrazzo stone niche is recessed into the shower wall for illuminated toiletry storage, the mineral surface contrasting with the warm clay tile surround. The vanity wall repeats the dual-texture composition — flat and fluted terracotta side by side — while a backlit mirror and floating FENIX vanity extend the LED accent language from niche to washbasin. The bathroom door is painted dark chocolate on the bathroom side to maintain the cocoon atmosphere, but returns to beige on the corridor face — a technically precise detail that maintains the seamless illusion in every room simultaneously.

The construction scope was complete: 330 square metres of wall plastering and painting, 61.6 square metres of engineered oak panel flooring, full rewiring with 44 electrical points, four replacement radiators, bathroom plumbing modifications, and the full joinery package across kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and corridor — all from a bare developer shell to a finished home. The general layout floor plan documents the spatial logic; the bathroom cross-sections record the dark cocoon construction in technical detail, specifying tile heights, shower niche position, vanity counter level, and the precise layering of materials that produces the finished bathing environment.