Ezequiel Adelmo Manasseri and María Sol Depetris had been searching for three years when they finally found their future apartment. Occupying the full second floor and an attic in one of Rosario, Argentina’s many “French-style” buildings—Haussmann-esque constructions dating from the early 20th century—the space had most recently housed an accounting firm.

The walls were painted a shabby pastel yellow, but it still had many original plaster details and a “casa chorizo” layout, a succession of rooms that open to an exterior gallery. The young couple, cofounders of both the architecture studio Manasseri Depetris and furniture brand Citrino, knew they had come across something special.

That was in 2015. For the first four years that they lived there, Eze and Sol used the 1,600-square-foot space as they found it. They set up a living area, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom on the lower floor and used the attic as their studio and for storage. But the floor plan had its limitations—when they invited friends over each week to cook tortilla together in the kitchen, anyone wanting to access the bathroom either had to cut through their bedroom or first venture outside.

“We personally didn’t mind, but realized that it was impractical,” Sol says. “We had to rethink the bedroom and create a private space.” So they embarked on a renovation, starting by turning the attic into an en suite bedroom.

The couple renovated the apartment over the course of a year or so, covering the walls with a stripped-down, whited-out palette punctuated by bursts of color courtesy of furniture they designed. Their primary objective was to preserve the spirit of the property, and they sought out artisans, many retired, who had the near-forgotten skills to restore ceiling roses and other ornamental plaster features.

From the foyer, original wooden doors give one the option of stepping into an office, living room, or dining room toward the front of the building or out to the gallery. The kitchen is still the center point of the home, a place to cook and congregate around a circular four-and-a-half-foot-wide terrazzo island with an integrated electric range.

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Between there and the original bathroom, the former bedroom is now the “blue room” (officially the library). It gets its name from a Memphis-inflected daybed and a tall storage tower, both designed by Sol and Eze. It’s a flexible space that could be partitioned into another bedroom if the couple decide to have a second child. Their daughter, Helena, now 13 months old, was born shortly after the renovation was completed and has her own room adjacent to the bath.

“These apartments are considered impractical because they have these external corridors to access different rooms—and usually only one bathroom. Yet we felt it had so much potential.”
—Ezequiel Adelmo Manasseri, designer and resident

The most striking addition is a new stair enclosure protruding out into the gallery and leading from the library up to the studio-turned-bedroom. It was fabricated from malleable metal-alloy panels, molded, erected, and spray painted in situ. Eze laughs, explaining that they used a car spray paint color called Gran Prix, the closest they could get to International Klein Blue while avoiding the headache of creating the formula themselves.

On a recent visit for early evening drinks, two guests slowly ascended in the building’s manually operated antique elevator, complete with its original seat, to encounter a brightly illuminated residence with strikingly high ceilings. Its French-style features contrasted with the bright colors of Sol and Eze’s furniture, copious houseplants, and contemporary artworks.

“We felt as if we were curators of a large gallery,” says Sol of bringing objects into the space. “We wanted our own designs to sit effortlessly alongside the art and the apartment’s original details.” With the perfect autumn breeze blowing in from open gallery doors, the resulting space felt as inviting as it was well composed.

Project Credits:

Architecture & Design: Manasseri Depetris / @manasseridepetris

Furniture: Citrino

Photography: Javier Agustín Rojas / @javieragustinrojas

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An Eye-Popping Stair Puts a Contemporary Twist on a Historic Apartment in Argentina