Rundtjernveien

Rundtjernveien is a minimalist apartment located in Oslo, Norway, designed by Studio Et al. This 100-square-meter total refurbishment in a functionalist apartment building demonstrates how stripping back rather than adding can reveal structural character while creating warmth and intimacy through selective material interventions. The project sands floors and walls down to structural layers left exposed, with materials added where necessary to subtly separate spaces and establish functional zones.

Massive Douglas fir boards added directly atop structural layers create low platforms for intimate house functions, demonstrating how minimal vertical shifts can define spatial hierarchies without conventional partitions. This platform strategy addresses the narrow apartment’s potential quality of connecting to both building sides while enhancing length and sight lines through generous hall as connecting space. Light wooden frames with fiberglass sheets permit daylight filtering into deep plan spaces, addressing illumination challenges typical of narrow apartment configurations.

The concrete-constructed building with load-bearing slabs and shear walls provides essentially open plan requiring spatial definition through furniture and material rather than structural walls. Custom kitchen island cast in concrete with local aggregate mediates space between kitchen and living room, demonstrating how heavy built elements can create soft boundaries maintaining visual connection while establishing functional separation. Place-built furniture pieces in pine and stained oak including warm kitchen niche, shoe-tying place, and towel storage construct in direct simple ways reflecting stripped-back aesthetic.

The material combination composing natural materials and surfaces in materials’ own colors reveals existing building’s structural layers. This honest expression of construction demonstrates how renovation can celebrate rather than conceal building systems, creating aesthetic of something unfinished or in constant change. The architectonic element separation provides opportunity to change or replace building parts or adapt structure to new purposes while main structure remains, supporting long-term building flexibility.

The functionalist apartment building context on Oslo outskirts positions the project within Norway’s mid-twentieth-century social housing traditions where rational planning and honest material expression defined architectural approaches. This historical precedent informs the contemporary intervention’s restraint and structural revelation, demonstrating continuity with modernist values through reduction rather than elaboration.

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