Child’s play

With functional and aesthetic qualities ideal for spaces used by children, ceramic tiles played an important role in the renovation of an apartment in the centre of Kiev, Ukraine. The project awarded to interior design firm Fateeva Design involved renovating a 76-square-metre home to be used by a family of six (the parents and their four children, two boys and two girls). The clients’ biggest priority was to reorganise the children’s bedrooms and study and play areas, so the interests and needs of the four younger members of the family took precedence over everything else. Ukrainian architect Elena Fateeva was tasked with dividing up a classic two-room apartment to create a space that would include a living room, kitchen with dining area, a bedroom for the parents and — as specified in the initial brief — the two children’s bedrooms, one for the girls and the other for the boys. Right from the start, the project focused on the children’s rooms. «Besides its small size, the main difficulty — but also the most interesting aspect — with the apartment was the presence of a large number of alcoves and recesses. We used fixed furnishings in an attempt to solve this problem and create straight lines and regular surfaces,» the architect explained. The living room was designed to accommodate the wardrobes and storage systems for the kitchen-dining area. The walls are a particularly distinctive feature throughout the apartment. Pale coloured glazed porcelain tiles from Vogue’s Graph collection were chosen for the children’s bedrooms, kitchen and two bathrooms, where they were mostly installed in a vertical layout. In both the girls’ room and the kitchen the wide joints between the tiles are bright red, whereas in the boys’ room a dark colour was chosen. The two bathrooms are dominated by the white of the sanitary fixtures, the fixed furnishings and the ceramic tiles, again rectangular and again laid vertically, with a joint that reflects the colour of the respective ceilings: blue in one and antique pink in the other. A graphic touch is provided by the black contour delineating the doorways, taken up again in the taps and the towel rails. So while initially focusing on the specific needs of the children, the project developed solutions that successfully met the requirements of the whole family.