CASA EMME | EMPATE studio

In the heart of Trieste, within an early twentieth-century building, the project intervenes on an apartment whose original layout remains legible, reinterpreting its logic to accommodate contemporary living.
The original plan—three rooms in sequence, a separate kitchen, and fragmented service areas—reflected a compartmentalized domestic model. The intervention works through reconnection, identifying key points of transformation within the circulation.
The primary gesture is the opening between kitchen and living room, creating a new social and spatial core. The central island acts as both functional and relational anchor, while a system of walnut and fluted glass sliding doors introduces a movable threshold that filters light and modulates continuity and separation.
The reorganization of the service areas redefines the domestic hierarchy. The addition of an en suite bathroom and the reconfiguration of the existing bath clarify degrees of privacy, while the introduction of a laundry and storage area—screened by a walnut-framed partition with translucent transom—maintains visual permeability and material coherence.
Keeping all spaces on a single level preserves spatial continuity. The integration of low-profile construction systems allows the introduction of new finishes and walk-in showers without interrupting the perception of the historic flooring.
Service areas such as kitchen and bathrooms become tactile material episodes within the domestic sequence, each defined by materials, color, and detail. Continuous baseboards integrate systems and furniture, while the flooring reinterprets typological tradition in a contemporary register.
Custom millwork reinforces compositional coherence. Walnut cabinetry dialogues with the large living room bookshelf—a lightweight system of tubular steel uprights and adjustable shelves that introduces a subtle tension between structure and material lightness.
Lighting completes the spatial composition, guiding the transition between communal and more intimate spaces.
The preservation of the historic woodwork and original parquet consolidates the dialogue with the pre-existing structure, establishing a measured balance between memory and transformation.