Two Colours and a Tenement: Schudy Studio's Żoliborz Apartment

A Tenement Reimagined

Żoliborz is one of Warsaw's quieter districts — a grid of prewar tenements built for the intelligentsia, interrupted by postwar reconstruction, still navigating what to do with that layered history. The apartment Schudy Studio inherited here is a case study in that tension: 59 square metres inside a 1950s building, carrying the ornamental logic of an earlier era on its mouldings and floorboards, while its floor plan reflected the economies of a different one.

The brief was renovation, not reinvention. The clients — including Sylwia Biegaj, an upholstery maker by profession — wanted to live well in what was already there. That meant the oak parquet stayed. The curved ceiling mouldings stayed. The brass hardware stayed. What changed was everything around those things: the plaster, the palette, the atmosphere.

© Martyna Rudnicka

Pistachio and Ruby Red

The project's defining move is also its simplest: two colours applied with precision against a ground of raw plaster. The pistachio green reads as something found rather than chosen — the kind of shade you'd expect on prewar ironwork, familiar enough to feel like it belongs. The ruby red operates differently, more declarative, interrupting the calm just enough to make you look twice.

"Colour here isn't decoration — it's the decision that makes everything else legible."

Neither colour competes with the apartment's existing texture. On restored oak parquet and rough plaster, both land exactly as intended: pistachio softens, ruby red anchors. The palette doesn't overrun the architecture. It finishes it.

© Martyna Rudnicka

© Martyna Rudnicka

The Craft of It

One of the more unusual dimensions of this project is who the client is. Sylwia Biegaj works as an upholstery maker, and her involvement wasn't limited to a brief. Several of the apartment's custom pieces — a mirror frame, a shelving unit, a low stool — were made by her hands. The apartment is inhabited before it's finished, authored by the person who will live in it.

"The best rooms aren't designed into existence — they're made. Sometimes by the same person who sleeps in them."

Schudy Studio held the space for that. The studio's own interventions — restored mouldings, selected hardware, new plaster — form the backdrop against which Sylwia's work sits. The brass handles on the joinery are original to the building, cleaned and kept. The curved ceiling profiles were repaired rather than stripped. Restraint was the primary design tool.

© Martyna Rudnicka

What 59 Square Metres Can Hold

Small apartments demand a kind of discipline that larger ones never quite teach. Every surface has to earn its place. Every colour decision reverberates through every room because there are no rooms far enough apart for a mistake to go unnoticed. Schudy Studio navigated this with a palette that's confident precisely because it's contained: two accent colours, applied once each, in exactly the right places.

"Small spaces don't forgive indecision. This one has none."

Curated by SILCO HAUS

This project earns its place in the SILCOHAUS index for the same reason the colours work: nothing here is accidental. The decision to preserve the building's prewar ornament rather than smooth it away, the choice to commission custom objects from the client herself, the exactness of where the pistachio stops and the plaster begins — this is interior architecture with a position, not just a palette.

© Martyna Rudnicka

© Martyna Rudnicka

© Martyna Rudnicka

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ŻOLIBORZ APARTMENT BY SCHUDY STUDIO · Photography: Martyna Rudnicka · Curated by SILCO HAUS, June 2026