Apartment in a former apartment building in St. Petersburg

Designer Alexandra Ivanova tells how to harmoniously combine rough plaster, pre-revolutionary stucco and Soviet vintage

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Alexandra Dubrova

OBJECT PARAMETERS

• Property type: apartment in a former apartment building of the Emir of Bukhara Emirate

• Where is located: St. Petersburg, Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt, 44

• Square footage: 120 m2

• Style: Eclectic

• The main idea of the project is to preserve the historical heritage and fit it into a fashionable European interior

• Color scheme: dark background tones and bright accents

• Authors of the project: designer Alexandra Ivanova, bulgurbureau.ru

Dining table, vintage. Chairs, IKEA. The parquet has been restored by Sunwood Art.

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Alexandra Dubrova

I am both the author of this project and the customer. I wanted to make the apartment cozy, at the same time elegant, with all the amenities for life. The interior reflects my views on comfort and aesthetics: restored artifacts, bright accents, attention to detail.

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Alexandra Dubrova

The apartment is located in a building built in 1913-1914, which the architect Stepan Krichinsky, popular at that time, designed by order of the Emir of the Emirate of Bukhara. Historically, the apartment was much larger (250 sq.m.), but in the Soviet years it was divided in two. We also divided the area we got into two parts. In one there are two bedrooms and an office-dressing room, in the other — a living room, a kitchen, bathrooms and a pantry.

The kitchen is made to order.

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Alexandra Dubrova

One of the primary tasks was to preserve as many historical details as possible. All windows, parquet and doors have been restored. The stucco in several rooms has been cleaned and left in the original colors of gypsum under drying oil, which makes it look like lace. Two fragments of the walls decided to leave uncoated in order to preserve the spirit of the times. They even have scraps of pre-revolutionary newspapers on them!

The stucco was restored by Anastasia Islyamova. The bed is made to order according to the designer's sketches. Chandelier, vintage, Mazzega. Wallpaper, Loymina.

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Alexandra Dubrova

As with most of my projects, I mixed expensive and budget solutions, vintage and new items in my own apartment. For example, in the dining area, a vintage teak dining table is surrounded by plastic "Ikea" chairs. The living room decor is complemented by a large retro-style sofa and a Danish cabinet with a sliding table top. Visually, these two zones are separated by different wall finishes: in the living room we used rough plaster, and in the dining room — "grandma's" flowered wallpaper.

Console, vintage, USSR.

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Alexandra Dubrova

Chest of drawers, vintage, Gunni Omann design. Armchair, vintage, GDR.

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Alexandra Dubrova

Kitchen furniture is hand-welded from metal and painted in mustard color. We have abandoned the upper cabinets, which makes the kitchen concise and elegant. The refrigerator was taken out to the pantry, which made it possible not to clutter up the compact room and organize storage. The walls of the kitchen are covered with plaster and painted black, but thanks to the colored facades and ceiling, it does not look dark.

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Alexandra Dubrova

The terracotta bedroom houses perhaps the most unusual and expensive item in the interior — a rosewood chest of drawers by Danish designer Gunni Omann. It was made in the 1960s - a real rarity.

Another bedroom occupies an irregularly shaped room with a cozy alcove, in which there is a couch. It's healthy to lie down, read and look at the sky. We specially chose the most simple lamps that do not distract attention from the luxurious stucco.

The original doors were restored by the Strela Partnership company.

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Alexandra Dubrova

The office is decorated according to the classic canons of the English office: dark embossed wallpaper, a comfortable Chesterfield leather sofa, a console desk with a vintage chair. Here, along one of the walls, I placed wardrobes to free other rooms from bulky furniture.

Chair, vintage.

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Alexandra Dubrova

I treat bathrooms the same way as I treat other rooms. In the bathroom, we painted the walls, hung a vintage Murmansk glass chandelier and fabric curtains, which are duplicated inside with moisture-resistant curtains. The toilet was decorated with wallpaper depicting theater boxes. I saw them a few years ago, and since then I have dreamed of using them to design a bathroom in one of my projects.

Lamps, IKEA.

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Alexandra Dubrova

The hall in this apartment is quite spacious, and all the doors in it are historical. They have "lived" in the apartment for more than a hundred years, they have accumulated a lot of damage: countless layers of paint, holes for locks and handles. After the restoration, the doors were decided to be painted in wine color. This shade from the entrance group itself "runs" through almost all the rooms of the apartment, combining them into a single whole.

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Alexandra Dubrova

Wallpaper, Cole & Son.

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Alexandra Dubrova

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