Palace Intrigue
It is safe, if clichéd, to bet that an average American cannot locate Vilnius on a map. It’s a city of 550,000 people and the capital of Lithuania. It populates a valley at the junction of the Vilnia and Neris rivers, some 194 miles east of the Baltic Seacoast. Now here’s a patriotic confession: Yours truly scarcely knew the aforementioned until arriving in Vilnius one freezing evening last February.
The renovated façade of Mikulionis’s flat, seen beyond thin snow and bare trees from the grounds of the monastery.
Sconces hang in front of the living room niche. The furnishings of the architect’s design are fully stocked with pillows made from exotic patterned fabrics.
Wearing a fur-lined cap with earflaps that cradle a wide bespectacled face, architect Rytis Mikulionis gives me a lift from the airport in his black Citroen sedan. Born in Kaunas, a city 62 miles outside of Vilnius, and educated at the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, he founded Plazma, a practice now eight-strong, six years ago. He is 37 and just moved into his first flat. In a booming real estate market, he took several years to find the property and spent the past couple years redoing it with his partner, Ausra Marcinkeviciute, an architect focused on interior design.
Moby the cat sits on the windowsill, which the architect constructed by cutting a geometric pattern into a thick sheet of MDF, a fiberboard product that’s inexpensive, easy to machine, and unrecognizable when coated in white lacquer paint.
In the bathroom, which is tucked under the mezzanine, the toilet-bidet set from Pozzi Ginori boasts rounded rectangles with pleasingly deep but minimal basins. The wall sconces are from the Spanish lighting company Vibia, and fit neatly between brick-like rectangular tiles.
In the car, Mikulionis apologizes about his English, which is quite good, and I about my Lithuanian, which is limited to one word, aciu—thank you—from the passport control guy. Is Lithuanian anything like Russian or Polish? "No, we are Balts," he says with almost-indignant pride. Though all the Baltic countries have distinct languages, Lithuanian and Latvian have a prehis-toric linguistic origin commonly called Balt—an Indo-European tongue in which some words resemble those of Sanskrit, ancient Greek, and Latin.
A couple items of antique furniture from Mikulionis’s family add to the flat’s feeling of history. A painting by Augustinas Liatukas, subject unknown, hangs at the entrance to the mezzanine bedroom above a custom lightbox featuring the ubiquitous CNC-cut geometric pattern.
Mikulionis custom designed the white steel staircase that leads from the living area up to the bedroom platform.
"We have always considered ourselves and our culture part of Europe," Mikulionis adds, referring to the national mindset that survived nearly 50 years of U.S.S.R. occu-pation in 1991. "The resistance was hiding in the forest the entire time."
Delicate detail punctuates the ceiling, which was once covered in Soviet army signatures.
The bed, on the mezzanine, has a B.Lux "Nite" light at its side. The drapes, from Designers Guild, hide the wall closet.
Today, Vilnius is a great place to be an architect. Since the Iron Curtain disintegrated, the city has been building nonstop. High-rises are shooting up in the new center, an area formerly filled with sculptural concrete Soviet monoliths. The old center is a splendor of baroque churches and estates, many of which were built by Italian architects when a Lithuanian duke, Sigismund the Old, married an Italian princess, Bona Sforza, in the 16th century. Now it’s full of restorations that feature contemporary interiors. There is plenty of work to be done.
The platform bed was designed by the architect. The pattern on the ceiling was drawn by Rasa Baradinskiene, a local designer, in colored pencil over the off-white paint. Mikulionis and Marcinkeviciute don’t worry about slipping through the rails to the living room level below.
The kitchen fits neatly on one wall. The architect reads at a black Ligne Roset dining set, beneath a Col pendant lamp by Francisco Luján. The tublar steel mezzanine rails were designed by Mikulionis, who enjoyed being exempt from the safety concerns that a client would force on him.
There is also a surplus of historical baggage, which, as in any former Eastern-block country, is palpably fresh. In the bleak winter, when the trees are bare and matted snow and ice cover every street, the architecture is para-mount. Colorful baroque buildings contrast the 20th-century Soviet architecture with keen, luscious clarity. In some cases, Soviet-era architects seem to have pulled gentle touches of baroque curves into their blocky compositions. And, even where they haven’t, the difference is exhilarating.
The wood stove roars atop a table designed by the architect.
The architect looks toward the grounds of an 18th-century monastery, which accompanies the domed church. The large hi-fi system with Infinity acoustics is three centuries newer than the building behind it. The wall sconces are from Luzifer Lamps in Spain. Their pattern of triangular prisms is reminiscent of ceilings in the domes of the Alhambra, the ancient Moorish palace in Andalucia. The shelves are stocked with souvenirs from Mikulionis’s travels—throughout both Europe and former Soviet states like Uzbekistan and Ukraine.
Mikulionis is fond of history. Driving by a city square where a huge statue of Lenin was dramatically pulled off its pedestal in 1991, he points out the lanterns still standing that once surrounded it. "There is a lot of talk in the city about rebuilding this square to make it more pedestrian friendly," he says. "Our practice might be involved. Those lanterns are typically Soviet, and I’d like to keep them there."
Rytis Mikulionis relaxes on a sectional sofa of his design, below a monumental Bul reading lamp by Ligne Roset. He gazes at the winter haze streaming through a grand picture window, the flat’s only source of natural light.
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