Mila Gench Turns a 400-Square-Foot Moscow Apartment Into a Working Jewelry Box

A 400-square-foot apartment in Moscow now holds a full kitchen with a wine cooler, a walled-off bedroom, an enlarged bathroom and a multi-monitor workspace — and still leaves room to exercise in the living room. Interior designer Mila Gench, founder of Gench Design, completed the renovation for a young professional in tech who prints 3D objects and crafts wooden lamps in his spare time.

"At first glance, it looks composed and serene, but the more time you spend in the apartment, the more unexpected details you discover," Gench said of the project, which sits in a modern residential development in Moscow.

What did the new layout change?

The original plan paired a small, separate kitchen with a larger living room. Gench rejected it outright. "For someone living alone, this layout didn't seem logical to me," she explained. "So we combined the kitchen and living room into a single open space, while separating the bedroom with a small wall to create a sense of privacy."

The bathroom gained square footage. A dedicated workspace entered the program, a must given the owner's creative pursuits. None of it came at the cost of circulation. "Even in the living room, there's still enough space to exercise," Gench said. Every choice served a single criterion: "Everything the owner needed had to be easily accessible, without making him feel constrained by the apartment's size."

How does color do the work of walls?

Gench's palette came directly from the client's stated preferences. "It was clear that he was drawn to a cool color scheme, but not a monochromatic one. He also wanted warm, saturated accents," she said.

The distribution is deliberate:

• Royal blue details run through the entryway and hallway.
• Berry red dominates the kitchen.
• The living room reads lighter in tone, anchored by a mustard sofa.
• The bedroom goes dark and atmospheric — "slightly more mysterious, like something from a fairy tale."

The mustard sofa, in Gench's words, "has become the heart of the living room." Its color echoes the yellow pendant lamp in the kitchen and reappears in small accents throughout the rest of the apartment. That continuity is functional, not merely decorative: the palette defines the different zones of the open plan without relying on walls. "It was important to me that the different colors appear not as isolated patches, but that they flow throughout the apartment," Gench said.

What hides inside the 'jewelry box'?

Gench calls the apartment "a little jewelry box." A checkered arch frames the kitchen. Frescoes, relief plaster panels and brass details catch the eye; the effect can feel like standing inside a Pop art piece. "I wanted the apartment to reveal itself little by little, with new details to discover in every corner: a metal object, a relief, a pattern, or an unusual surface," she said.

The client's favorite move: perforated metal doors on the upper cabinets in the kitchen and bathroom. "At one point, I'd considered not using them. They were complicated to install and drove up the cost," Gench admitted. "But the client insisted." Their graphic precision plays against the painted surfaces and soft shapes elsewhere — a contrast Gench reads as a portrait of the owner himself.

She treated the cabinets as architecture, not storage. "I chose to highlight them and make them part of the apartment's decorative language, almost like architectural elements," she said. Her credo follows: "Art isn't a final touch added at the end of the project, it should be part of the concept from the very beginning."

How does the workspace avoid taking over?

The brief demanded professional-grade capacity. "The workspace had to be as professional as possible, with a large desk to accommodate the latest technology and multiple monitors," Gench said. She planned the area's height, storage and furniture proportions with equal care, while guarding one boundary: "At the same time, I was concerned with not turning the living room into an office."

The desk echoes the room's colors and materials and blends into the space. After hours, it converts into a media station. "A screen on the desk can be seen from the sofa, so the same space can easily transition from working to relaxing and watching a movie," Gench noted.

Why does small-scale design punish approximation?

Gench's sharpest lesson for practitioners concerns tolerance. "The more compact the space, the less it tolerates rough approximations: Sometimes a single centimeter is enough to determine whether a corner will be comfortable or whether a cabinet door can open fully without hitting the wall," she said.

The custom designs accounted for the precise width of the sofa, the clearance needed to move around the bed, the size of storage units, and the dimensions of a kitchen equipped with a refrigerator, dishwasher, oven, microwave and wine cooler. Most furnishings come from contemporary Russian manufacturers.

Gench's closing instruction doubles as the project's thesis: "Don't pretend that 400 square feet is more than it is, but instead find a way to make it truly sufficient for daily life." For designers facing the same footprint, the Moscow apartment demonstrates that millimeter-level planning and a saturated, continuous palette can replace walls — and that constraints a client refuses to drop, like perforated cabinet doors, can become the design's signature.

This article originally appeared in AD Italia.