When the parents of a young screenwriter and philosophy graduate bought her a 68-square-metre apartment, their brief was refreshingly specific: give our daughter a proper library. For interior designer Elizaveta Ryzhova, that single request became the spine of the whole project. A custom bookshelf, built by the Platforma joinery workshop, now sits directly on the apartment’s main visual axis, the first thing a visitor reads, quite literally, about the person who lives here.

The client’s parents, accustomed to a large house, worried the new flat might feel cramped. Ryzhova’s answer was to erase boundaries rather than add square metres. Long sightlines run the length of the apartment, aided by a glass partition with double doors between living and dining rooms, and by transom windows that push daylight into every corner, utility spaces included. A rare 3.4-metre ceiling height did the rest. “The apartment can be viewed almost entirely from any point within it,” notes Ryzhova, the interior appears to dissolve its own walls.

The palette leans into warm wood, greenery and a nostalgia the designer likens to a grandmother’s home, filtered through the client’s fascination with Japanese culture and vintage photography. Custom doors by DoorsPro, designed with Dima Loginoff and nodding to Constructivist architecture, became the client’s favourite detail. Underfoot, Finex flooring in rich timber tones grounds a mix that is confidently eclectic: a Muuto pendant and Flos floor lamps in the living room, alongside a Mononova sofa, a Dantone Home armchair and artworks by Sergey Kozlikin and Boris Kocheyshvili.

In the dining room, vintage 1960s Howe and Cesca chairs from 13PM Store Gallery sit beneath a Petit Potence lamp by Jean Prouvé for Vitra, with Ferm Living tableware and a painting by Alexander Labas nearby. The bedroom pairs a Dantone Home bed with a 1970s Gastone Rinaldi console chair from Beke Gallery.

Restraint in the architecture, expression in the objects: it’s a formula Ryzhova describes as a balance “between purity and character, movement and stillness.” The result reads less like a starter flat than a portrait: bookish, well-travelled, quietly assured.