Not only is the view of the rooftops and church towers of Pest captivating from the top floor, but there is also a fantastic panorama towards Gellért Hill. Ivett and Zsolt work together both in their private lives and as members of the Minusplus architectural firm, and their home is also their joint work. They moved into this apartment a few years ago, which they bought because with the money they had, they could only afford to buy a much smaller one with an inner courtyard.

They were familiar with the developments planned for the area since they were architecture students, so they took the new project on board with confidence. The ten-story house was built in the mid-eighties, not according to the Soviet, but to a Danish standard design. “The difference is that while the supporting structure of the Soviet models is made of panels, the Danish ones are tunnel-formed structures, thermally insulated on the outside, so the house does not suffer from the typical panel problems,” Ivett lists the advantages.

“In the old floor plan, every function had its place, but separately. So, when a group of people came and took a seat in the living room, I lost track of what was going on while I was opening the bottle of wine in the kitchen, and by the time I got back,” Ivett says. When it turned out that everything in the apartment needed to be replaced anyway, the family thought they would replace the kitchen and bathroom instead. But now, all that was left was to tear down a partition wall so that the kitchen, dining room, and living room could be in one space. In the living room, replacing the balcony door undoubtedly brought about the huge change in the sense of space, because this way the outdoor area became a continuation of the living room.

The young couple designed almost all the furniture themselves. The worktop in the kitchen, which is open to the living room, was relatively small, but fortunately they managed to arrange the things in a way that was easy to use. They needed the element placed in the space because of the refrigerator, but this piece of furniture was also designed to work from both directions, with the other side functioning as a sideboard. Ivett wanted a dining table where she could do many things at the same time, such as working, preparing ingredients for cooking, and of course, eating the food.

When they started to remove the several layers of wallpaper, they saw the raw concrete surfaces of the supporting walls, which Ivetké had intended to leave as is. However, because the mischievous drawings of the joking workers came to light during the washing, they were only able to clean the living room wall, not the hall wall. The poorly laid, fragmented ceramic tiles in the kitchen, hall, and bathrooms were replaced with white synthetic resin.

“The mosaic covering the entire wall is the result of several attempts, using materials and techniques that we love: mosaic, pixel graphics, and cross-stitch.”