One Bold Oval Does All the Work in This Precision-Tuned Apartment by Antwe.

An oval changes everything. In this 130-square-metre apartment, designed by Antwe for a young woman and her daughter, a single curved volume does the heavy lifting—separating the entrance from the kitchen-living zone, setting the whole plan spinning into a continuous circular loop, and quietly swallowing almost every functional necessity a home throws up.

That last part is the clever bit. Inside the oval’s rounded geometry sits a coat wardrobe on one side and a storage room packed with technical systems on the other. Turn to face the kitchen-living area and the same volume becomes the kitchen itself: folding facades that, when closed, present a clean, minimalist mass with zero visual clutter. Antwe deliberately kept it below ceiling height to read as an object within a larger open space, rather than just introducing another wall.

Wrapped in Merbau veneer under a high-gloss lacquer, the curved surface faces the windows and does something rather lovely: it multiplies the light, bouncing the city and sky back into the room. Reflection becomes a running theme. A large entrance mirror captures the apartment’s main visual axis; at sunset, the whole interior floods with soft pink.

Art is doing real work here, not merely decorating. A commissioned epoxy resin piece anchors the kitchen-living sightline at its vanishing point; another glows in the master bathroom beside rounded door reveals. Red arrives as a deliberate jolt against the cool monochrome—a bold shoe cabinet in the bedroom, Persian Red travertine, and a translucent resin sink in the guest WC that throws crimson light across the floor.

It is, frankly, immaculate. Patagonia quartzite, satin stainless steel, microcement underfoot—every sample reportedly sweated over, sometimes five paint tests deep. Which raises the honest question this level of precision always raises: where does the living happen? When the kitchen folds away and the wardrobes disappear into the curve, is there room left to be messily, gloriously at home?

Antwe’s answer is built into the plan—movable furniture and a children’s room that splits into play and sleep zones and grows with the child. The control, it turns out, is what makes the looseness possible.

Whether it reads as a home or a very beautiful idea of one is the kind of thing only its occupants can answer.

Diagonal Thinking: Ba-rro Reinvents a Madrid Apartment.

Ba-rro brings a striking conceptual clarity to this Madrid renovation. A diagonal move disrupts the original floor plan, redirecting circulation and softening hard boundaries into transitions.

[Images courtesy of Antwe. Styling by Natalia Onufreichuk. Photography by Mikhail Loskutov.]