Away: Rented apartment for bachelors on Maslovka

about the project
A place: Rented one-bedroom apartment in the artists’ house in Moscow
Year: 2016
The size: 65 sq.m
Who lives here: Sergey Vasin and Oleg Kachalov
Authors of the project: Apartment tenants
Budget: 100,000 rubles, including furniture and accessories
Photo: Ekaterina Lieberman

Interesting fact: The House of Artists, built in 1949-1954, is one of the buildings of the famous “Town of Artists“ on Verkhnyaya Maslovka, conceived back in the 1920s. In addition to residential apartments, it has workshops with increased ceiling heights. The apartment rented by friends is located on the top floor, where the windows have semicircular ends.

Sergey and Oleg have known each other since 2011. Oleg Katchalov – digital producer: “I lead projects for the development of mobile applications, websites, I work in an agency and on the client side”. Sergey Vasin is a co-founder and art director of the WOLK design studio, which creates websites and corporate styles. “At the beginning of this year, Sergei moved out of his apartment, and I offered him to rent a kopeck piece or a three-ruble note together. Our housing requirements were the same. It was supposed to be a “Stalinist” with white walls, high ceilings and no furniture, ”says Oleg.

Sergey explains: “We wanted to find an empty apartment in order to arrange it for ourselves. While searching, I saw a studio apartment with high ceilings in an artists’ house, but it was already occupied. We decided to look in all the houses of artists, and literally a week and a half later, a suitable option appeared. At first we wanted to rent a three-room apartment so that we would have a separate living room, but here the kitchen has completely taken over this function. “

At the entrance to the hallway there is a small sofa under a wide mirror. There is an old herringbone parquet on the floor: “The parquet was in good condition, it was“ refreshed ”by the landlord just before we rented it. The sofa has already been here “, – says Oleg…

The kitchen, which became the center of the house for Sergei and Oleg, not only during funny friendly parties, but also during working hours (Sergei often works at home), is located at the opposite end from the entrance. The long corridor space is the main storage location in the apartment. It is hidden behind white curtains: “The shelves and roof rails were left over from the old tenants, and we bought additional curtains to maintain the overall style of the room,” says Sergey. “There we keep all our personal belongings, shoes, jackets – everything that usually takes up a large area of ​​rooms,” comments Oleg.

The kitchen is the only room in the apartment that was originally white, as the guys wanted. “Its size is 3.6×3.6 m plus niche space. But because of the 3.1 m high ceiling (up to the protruding beam), the kitchen seems large, although there is only 13 sq. M., ”Notes Sergei.

There is a washing machine and a dishwasher under the work surface. In the corner there is a small stove for two burners. “The kitchen was fully equipped, and we did not change anything here,” Oleg clarifies.

The second exit from the apartment to the stairs leading to the artist’s workshops, which is no longer in use, is hidden behind a pine sideboard. In a niche to his left is a TV bracket, but since young people do not need it, a mask was hung on the bracket, a gift from a mutual friend of Sergei and Oleg from Madrid.

In the center of the kitchen is a long pine table with white legs. “It is convenient to cook here: in addition to the work surface, there is a large table surface. At first, we spent eighty percent of the time in the kitchen, met a lot with friends, went to the rooms only to sleep, ”Oleg recalls.

Sergey adds: “Twenty people gathered in our kitchen for my birthday – he just got into the housewarming period. All fit perfectly! ”

Above the sofa, young people have hung three photo frames, in which the exposition is periodically changed. “Now there are my photographs from my trip to California,” says Sergey. – I went there for six months: I spent three months in Los Angeles, two months in San Francisco. San Francisco is very beautiful, but I didn’t like the climate and it’s not as fun as Los Angeles with great beaches and summer all year round. ”

An old Fisher cassette recorder – a gift from Sergey’s grandmother: “She offered it to me as a present for my last birthday. We just moved in and it was a great idea – he fits very well here! “

Next to the kitchen are the premises of the bathroom and toilet, trimmed with light pink and light blue tiles along the bottom. Here, the new tenants of the apartment also did not change anything.

But in the rooms they decided to remove the unsuitable wallpaper, to repair the ceiling, which was cracked here and there. “The rooms had pale blue and pink wallpaper. We had to persuade the owner to make repairs at our expense! We promised that we would not use drywall and disturb neighbors with noise, but only glue non-woven wallpaper for painting. ”

The first along the corridor is Oleg’s room. The walls were painted light gray. “In this room, the wallpaper was removed so that a thin layer of paper remained on the walls. We put paint right on top of it. At first, the paper bubbled slightly, but then it stretched perfectly, so now it looks like plaster, ”comments Sergey.

Oleg spent 30 thousand rubles on the furnishings. As in Sergei’s room, there is a workplace, a rack and a bed. At first Oleg’s bed stood at the opposite wall, but since then he has already managed to rearrange it.

On the window there are curtains in a warm shade, matching the pine furniture. Oleg put a small pine chest of drawers opposite the bed. It has a present from a friend living in London: poster by David Shrigley, an exclusive collaborator with Tate Gallery, 2004, Untitled. For his room, Oleg bought two trees: a small tangerine and a cypress growing in a floor pot.

He put the tangerine tree on the bedside table at the head of the bed: “It is very whimsical and rather difficult to care for.” There is a night light next to him: “This lamp projects with a laser onto the ceiling the ‘starry sky’ above the bed.”

On Oleg’s desktop there is a controller for mixing musical compositions and a speaker: “I mix music, sometimes I play at friends’ parties. I like to choose the music so that the compositions are perfectly matched in key. ” Next to the bed, Oleg keeps a midi keyboard that connects to a computer: “Friends gave it to me even before the repair, sometimes I play it.”

On the opposite wall, opposite the table, is a white metal rack. Among other things – the English music magazine Wire: “I was subscribed to it before, they write about avant-garde and experimental music: jazz, hip-hop, alternative, electronics and other musical directions.” On the top shelf is a birthday present for Oleg: “My ex-girlfriend painted me a” portrait “of a Shiba Inu dog, which I really like.”

Sergei’s room is located between the kitchen and Oleg’s room. The walls are painted in two colors: white and light gray (the same as in Oleg’s room). The surface of the wall has a light texture: “I went to Leroy Merlin and saw there a 50 m long roll of glass canvas painting. I asked the workers there if it was possible to paint it clean, they answered that it was possible. But when the artist we hired glued it on and began to paint, he put four coats of paint, and it all sucks in and goes in spots, although there were two additional coats of primer paint under it. So it took four times as much money to paint in my room: a total of eight layers! – Sergey laughs. “Then we understood the technique: first, we had to paint up and down with a roller, and then horizontally across, in order to paint over the texture of the fiberglass well”.

The furniture in Sergei’s room is more graphic. Unlike Oleg, he chose black items. Next to the bed, in front of which there is a vintage Soviet carpet, Sergei put up a poster, hung a picture over the headboard, and both are gifts from friends: “The poster is the work of Tanya Tribunalova. She lives in Berlin, she gave me a slide, and I myself have already printed it and rolled it onto foam board.

The picture was presented to me by a girl. Her colleague began to paint in oils, posted her work on Facebook, I “liked” it, and after a while the painting was presented to me. The carpet near the bed is from the parent’s apartment. He was lying there on the mezzanine, gathering dust. Without him, the room lacked a bit of bright spots, he does an excellent job with this role. “

The telescope is a gift from parents for Sergei’s 25th birthday.

Between the bed and the desk is a floor lamp with an “Edison lamp” without a lampshade: “I bought a floor lamp with a lampshade at IKEA, then I bought a new lampshade, but it turned out to be with different fasteners. Then I decided to put an “Edison lamp” here. This decision is pretty boring in restaurants, and I have not yet met it in home interiors. As a result, it looks good and, when paired with a carpet, adds a feeling of coziness. “

All work on painting the premises and assembling new furniture in the rented apartment took a week. “The budget of our renovation without furniture is 45 thousand rubles.” Furniture in Sergei’s room cost 20 thousand rubles. – “We bought everything at IKEA, collected it in a day, then posted photos on Instagram and began to collect responses and” likes “from friends!”

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Interior shooting from special project “Houzz Away”