This apartment in Vienna’s Josefstadt is my home, but it is also where my interior design practice began. I moved in in 2012, at twenty one, while still studying graphic and advertising design at the University of Applied Arts and just after founding Atelier Karasinski. With limited means, I began renovating and working from here. At times, the living room served simultaneously as a meeting space, photo studio and design office.

The apartment was never approached conceptually. It grew intuitively, shaped by necessity, curiosity and time. What I value most are its peculiarities. The mismatched keys for every door. The way light behaves differently in each room. The ease with which a vintage piece can sit beside a second-hand find.

Objects have always guided the space. A Space Age coffee table bought used. A Wittmann Constanze chair reupholstered with care. A poster rescued from an old cinema in Havana.

Over the years, the apartment changed alongside me. White walls gradually gave way to colour, chosen for resonance rather than style. Objects recur. A mirror saved by my parents. A zebra motif that appears playfully throughout. Vintage chairs reinterpreted in new fabrics. Nothing is staged, yet nothing is accidental. The apartment continues to evolve. It remains a lived-in archive, where personal life and creative work happily overlap.

• Category: Residential
• Completed: 2019
• Location: Vienna, Austria

Photographs by © Philipp Jelenska. This project was published by AD Germany, AD Italia, Elle Decoration, FAZ Quarterly and Vogue Polska.