The clients came to Moscow-based architect Dasha Kossa with a reference photo. It showed a spacious living room in a wooden country house, double-height ceilings, light pouring in from everywhere, the sense that the outdoors had simply decided to come inside. The apartment they had just purchased was 57 square meters of concrete on the top floor of a low-rise building on the western outskirts of Moscow, near the river and the forest. The gap between the dream and the reality was significant. Kossa decided to close it vertically.
The apartment’s saving grace was its position on the top floor, which came with a small balcony extension on a second level, not a full floor, just a ledge of sorts, about 15 square meters. Kossa saw it differently. She designed and built a complete second floor in its place, adding two bedrooms and a bathroom while preserving what mattered most on the ground floor: the double-height living room and the large panoramic window that stretched all the way up to the roofline. When the renovation was finished, the apartment measured 71 square meters, not a dramatic gain on paper, but spatially, an entirely different proposition.
The staircase she designed to connect the two levels does not touch the walls. It floats, or appears to, and that visual lightness is deliberate, it adds volume to the living room rather than stealing from it, becoming a sculptural presence in a space where every element has to earn its place. “As an architect, my goal is to work with space not just in terms of decoration and function, but also in form and volume,” Kossa explains. The staircase is perhaps the clearest expression of that philosophy in the apartment.
On the ground floor, the kitchen and living room are separated not by a wall but by vertical structures, open partitions that divide without closing, maintaining the flow of light and air between the two areas. The same rhythmic pattern of decorative bindings runs through the partitions, the guest bedroom window on the second floor, and the wallpaper behind the headboard, a thread that stitches both levels of the apartment into a coherent whole. “This common rhythmic element allowed me to connect both levels,” Kossa says.
The entrance hall sets a different tone from the rest of the apartment. Its storage facades were crafted using marquetry, a woodworking technique typically reserved for fine furniture, and the result is something closer to an artwork than a coat cupboard. A glass lamp by Nordal hangs nearby, its blurred pattern echoing the marquetry’s own soft, almost geological quality. The walls here carry a deep, dark hue with a purple undertone, a counterintuitive choice that Kossa used deliberately to make the ground floor feel more expansive by contrast.
Color throughout the apartment works the way weather does: you notice its effects before you notice the color itself. The main living spaces are painted in grayish and off-white tones that shift character depending on the light, hazy on sunny days, misty when it rains. The terracotta floor on the first floor grounds the space, while a mossy sofa from SKdesign, ochre and yellow textiles, and ceramics from 123 Ceramics Atelier introduce warmth without disrupting the palette’s quietness. The panoramic windows pull the surrounding forest and river into the composition, making nature the most insistent decorative element in the room.
In the center of the living room, a painting called “Cow Cape” by Pavel Efanov hangs on an oak portal. Kossa placed it there to create depth, “as if you were sitting there and looking at the river outside the window.” Tables by AM.PM and La Redoute Intérieurs sit nearby, alongside floor vases from La Forma and Ferm Living. The effect is of a room that has been lived in thoughtfully over time, not installed.
Upstairs, the private spaces each have their own distinct atmosphere. The main bedroom is enveloped in warm gray across both walls and ceiling, a decision that collapses the distinction between surface and enclosure, making the room feel genuinely cocooning. The bed is by SK Design; the furnishings by AM.PM. The feature wall here has a story: it was meant to arrive as a pre-finished gray wallpaper, but the material came as a plain white textured substrate. Rather than send it back, Kossa had the raised squares hand-painted in a custom color, then layered a three-dimensional panel over the top. The result is richer than anything a factory finish could have produced.
The guest bedroom runs in a different direction — creamy, warm, flooded with light from its custom-shaped window, which frames a view through the living room’s panoramic glass to the landscape beyond. The bed is by UNIKA møblar; the shelving bedside tables by WOUD; the lights by Francisco Segarra and Faro. In the small second-floor bathroom, a custom-framed mirror depicting a group of turtles, a nod to the family’s pet, hangs above the basin. Kossa had proposed it half-expecting pushback. It was approved immediately, and once installed, it gave the room something that no material specification could have planned for: personality.
That quality, personality arriving through precision, warmth earned through restraint, runs through the entire apartment. Kossa minimized walls and corridors wherever she could, filling the space instead with visual techniques: the floating stair, the repeating partition pattern, the color transitions that move from dense and intimate to bright and open as you climb from floor to floor. The clients wanted a countryside house. They got one, somehow, 71 square meters at a time.
