Beige: A Kyiv Apartment Designed Around Its Own Architecture

Interiors · Kyiv

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Beige, a 106 square metre apartment in Kyiv, is usually filed as minimalism. It is better read as an editing job: two designers choosing what a building already had worth keeping, then adding as little as possible around it.

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Introduction

Beige occupies 106 square metres in an apartment building in Kyiv, and the decision that defines it was made before either Evgeniy Bulatnikov or Emil Dervish specified a single piece of furniture: keep what the building already gives you, and stop the new work from competing with it.

The building supplied deep-set, generously proportioned windows, curved door and window openings, and ornamental plaster cornices and ceiling roses, the kind of period detail a renovation this thorough could easily have stripped out in favour of a blanker canvas. Bulatnikov and Dervish did the opposite. They repainted, refloored and refurnished around those details rather than over them, then limited the new additions to a short, named list of furniture and materials, each piece doing a specific job rather than filling space.

The result has circulated widely online since late 2017, reproduced across design blogs and magazines in the years since. Almost none of that coverage, including the version previously published on this site, has credited both of the people who designed it.

That correction is worth making properly, because Beige is a genuinely two-handed piece of work, and understanding why it holds together as tightly as it does means understanding what each half of that partnership actually contributed.

Two names, one restrained idea

Beige is credited, in every independent account of the project, to two designers working together: Evgeniy Bulatnikov and Emil Dervish, both based in Kyiv. That distinction matters, because a project this pared back is easy to read as the work of a single, decisive hand, and Beige is not that. It is the product of two practices meeting on the same idea from different directions.

Bulatnikov’s own body of work runs toward soft, chalky palettes, clean lines and natural timber, an aesthetic he has carried into other residential projects, including Warm Sand, a Saint Petersburg apartment built around a similarly restrained material list. Dervish’s practice, run from Kyiv, covers architecture and interior design across projects including the Cathedral Apartment in the city and a project named Birdsnest in Copenhagen, and his work has been featured internationally, including in Wallpaper* and Dwell. Where Bulatnikov’s signature is the palette, Dervish’s is the architectural editing, and Beige reads as a project where both were operating at full strength at once.

What the apartment keeps

The building’s own architecture is doing more work in Beige than anything the designers added to it. Deep, generously proportioned windows flood the rooms with light, and the openings between rooms are curved rather than square, a detail original to the building that most renovations of this kind quietly straighten out. Ornamental cornices and ceiling roses, plasterwork original to the building’s construction, remain in place throughout, picked out rather than painted flat or removed.

Keeping those details intact is a decision with a cost. It is considerably easier, and often cheaper, to strip a period apartment back to bare walls and start again than to renovate carefully around existing plasterwork and curved openings that were never designed to accommodate modern services. Bulatnikov and Dervish chose the harder route, and the payoff is an apartment that reads as considered rather than gutted, its new material palette laid over a structure that still looks like itself.

The curved openings do practical work as well as historical work. A square doorway is a hard edge, a single decisive line between one room and the next. A curved one softens that transition and pulls the eye along the wall rather than stopping it dead, which matters in an apartment built around a short material palette, since anything that interrupts the flow between rooms would draw more attention to itself than a palette this restrained can afford. Keeping the curve, in other words, is not simply preservation. It is the detail doing quiet spatial work that a straightened opening would have undone.

A material list short enough to name

Strip Beige down to its materials and there are, in effect, four: a soft dove grey on the walls, whitewashed timber parquet underfoot, brushed brass at every point of contact, and a deep, veined green stone reserved for the rooms that need the weight. That is a short list for an apartment this size, and the brevity is the point. Each material appears often enough, and consistently enough, that a reader could reconstruct the palette from a handful of photographs, which is a rarer achievement in a finished interior than it sounds.

The green stone carries the most work. It forms a substantial partition in the principal bathroom, separating the sleeping quarters from the bathing area while concealing the plumbing and services behind it, and it reappears as the fireplace surround and in smaller accessories through the apartment. Repeating one material across a structural partition, a fireplace and a scatter of objects is what makes a palette read as a decision rather than a coincidence, and it is why the stone, rather than the brass or the timber, is the material that holds the apartment’s identity together.

Brass, by contrast, is used almost entirely at the edges: door frames, recessed hardware, light fittings and plumbing fixtures, the points where a hand actually touches the building. That is a specific, considered use of a warm metal rather than a decorative flourish, and it is the detail that keeps an otherwise cool, neutral palette from reading as cold.

Furniture chosen like punctuation

With so few new materials in play, the furniture had to be chosen with unusual precision, and the list Bulatnikov and Dervish settled on reads like a shortlist of the most legible names in twentieth century and contemporary design rather than a furnished room. Upholstered seating comes from Vladimir Kagan, who apprenticed under his father, a master cabinetmaker, before opening his own New York studio in 1949 and winning a Museum of Modern Art Good Design award the same year. His sculptural, sinuous sofas defined a strand of postwar American modernism built around comfort as much as form, and the sofa in Beige carries that same instinct for a curved frame over a rectilinear one.

The dining and occasional chairs are Pierre Jeanneret’s, designed in the mid-1950s for Chandigarh, the Indian city he helped plan alongside Le Corbusier after independence. Jeanneret’s Chandigarh furniture was built in teak with woven cane seats and backs specifically because the material breathed in the region’s heat and held warmth in its winters, a practical answer to climate rather than a stylistic one, made using local craft techniques rather than imported manufacturing. That furniture, originally produced to furnish a new city’s schools, courts and government buildings, has since become one of the most widely referenced and sought-after bodies of work in contemporary interiors, and a pair of those chairs in a Kyiv apartment carries that entire history with it.

Lighting comes from Michael Anastassiades, the Cypriot-born, London-based designer, whose Bob wall sconces and Angle pendant fixtures bring a contemporary, almost architectural minimalism to rooms otherwise furnished with mid-century pieces. Mixing a postwar American sofa, a chair designed for a newly independent nation’s civic buildings, and contemporary lighting in the same rooms is a genuine curatorial decision, not a default, and it works here because every piece shares the same restraint: none of them is asking to be the loudest object in the room.

That combination is also why the apartment photographs as calmer than a simple list of its furniture would suggest. A handful of well-chosen pieces, each with its own history and none of them competing, reads as considerably more resolved than a room furnished to a brief.

The photography nobody credits, and a likely reason why

One gap runs through every published version of Beige, including the original: nobody names a photographer. That is unusual for a project with this much circulation, since photography credits are normally among the easiest facts to establish, and it is worth chasing on a project covered this widely.

The likeliest explanation sits in Emil Dervish’s own practice. Alongside architecture and interior design, photography is listed as one of his stated specialisms. A designer who photographs his own projects has no external credit to supply, because there may be no external photographer involved at all: the image-making would then sit inside the same practice that designed the rooms, rather than being handed off once the renovation finished. That would also help explain something about the published photographs themselves, which read less like a photographer documenting someone else’s rooms after the fact and more like images composed by someone who understood exactly which detail in each frame was doing the work, because they had chosen it in the first place. It is a plausible explanation rather than a confirmed one, and worth putting to Dervish directly.

Where Beige sits in a wider body of restraint

Beige was not an isolated exercise for either designer. Bulatnikov returned to a closely related material language in Warm Sand, and in Mist House, another residential project that carries the same preference for softened, tonal interiors over contrast. Read alongside those projects, Beige looks less like a one-off commission and more like a working method: identify what a building already offers, choose a short material list that respects it, then furnish with pieces specific enough to survive being seen on their own.

That consistency is worth noting for a reader trying to place Beige within a wider practice, because it answers a question the apartment alone cannot: whether the restraint on show here is a response to this particular building, or a genuine design position. The repetition across multiple projects, in different cities, suggests the latter.

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Final thoughts

It would be easy to file Beige as another minimalist apartment, one more set of pale rooms in a genre that has produced a great many of them. That reading misses what actually happened here. Nothing in Beige is empty for its own sake. The walls are plain because the cornices above them are not. The furniture list is short because every piece on it, from a Kagan sofa to a Jeanneret chair to an Anastassiades light, was chosen specifically enough to survive being seen alone in a room with almost nothing else in it.

That is a harder brief than filling a space, and a harder one than stripping it bare. Bulatnikov and Dervish kept the apartment’s own architecture in play throughout, then added exactly as much as that architecture could carry without being crowded out. Beige is not an argument for less. It is an argument for choosing carefully, and it is a two-name argument, not a one-name one.