Historic, not nostalgic: A Karlovy Vary apartment renovation led by openings and light

Set a short walk from Karlovy Vary’s colonnades and the Hotel Thermal, home to the city’s international film festival, this early-1900s apartment has been entirely reconstructed with a clear agenda: to recover the scale, clarity, and quiet charm that time had gradually diluted. Facing a hillside of mature greenery, the flat sits inside a historic building where traces of a more generous domestic era still survived beneath layers of later interventions.

The renovation began as an act of subtraction. Over the decades, the apartment had gathered an untidy mix of secondary structures, mismatched tiles, lowered ceilings, and piecemeal layout edits. The design team set out to remove this accumulation, reopen passages, and return the interior to its original dimensions and atmosphere.

Working in close alignment with the investor, they made a decisive move: widening key openings, eliminating unnecessary doors, and introducing transom windows to maintain privacy while extending light deeper into the plan. The former walk-through rooms were removed in favor of a contemporary arrangement with two separate bedrooms anchored by a connected living core.

At the center, the living room was treated as the apartment’s main volume and light reservoir. The goal was not to add complexity, but to make space feel lighter and more continuous. A compact kitchen unit was inserted into a newly formed niche between the kitchen and living room, creating a clean seam between functions without breaking the room’s openness.

An interior window reconnects these zones, recalling a once-common feature in spacious Central European apartments, where borrowed light and visual permeability made circulation feel less like a corridor and more like part of the home.

In the bedrooms, the original wooden floor was preserved and refinished, allowing patina to remain part of the interior’s character rather than something to be erased. The bathroom shifts into a more sculptural register while staying materially quiet, organized around an irregularly shaped, generously sized shower alongside a washbasin and toilet. A minimal palette and consistent detailing run throughout the apartment, reinforcing a calm, unforced atmosphere.

The project’s most distinctive gesture is also its most understated. Across ceilings and walls, areas of exposed original paintwork were kept visible, turning the apartment’s own history into a graphic presence. In each room, these remnants form bold, almost image-like fields, yet they remain defined by a subtle color palette. Rather than treating age as imperfection, the renovation frames it as a gentle visual narrative, anchoring the new layout in the building’s memory.

The final phase introduced a sparse selection of furniture, led by minimalist pieces from Janský & Dunděra and the brand Todus. The effect is deliberately quiet: objects that support proportion, surface, and light, rather than competing with the restored architectural envelope.

Project Credit

Studio: Plus One Architects / @plusonearch
Designer: Petra Ciencialová, Kateřina Průchová
Location: Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic
Completed: 2023
Photographer: Radek Úlehla