A Storage Space Becomes the Coziest Vintage-Filled Living Room (It’s Unrecognizable!)
It’s fascinating to watch something not intended to be a house — like a shipping container, school bus, or pickle factory — become a home. Walls might have to go up to divide rooms, new flooring can make a space cozier, and, of course, the right furniture can really take a space from retail to residential.
Alessandra Donisi (@homelette.jpg) turned a large, empty storage space into a cozy home to share with her partner, Raffi, and their French bulldog, Pablo.
“It had no real flooring, no interior walls, and was completely undefined,” Alessandra says. “It started with a big cleanup. From there, we basically built everything from scratch: Walls had to be constructed to divide the space, electrical and plumbing systems installed, and flooring laid down. It was like starting from zero.” A few key things made the apartment — especially the living room — feel like home.
There’s a dark green accent wall.
Alessandra painted the walls herself; for the living room, she chose Luxens’ Laguna to go with white. “It really transformed the space,” Alessandra says.
One of the gifts — and curses — of the space was all of the doors that open up to a wraparound terrace, and that meant there weren’t very many “full walls to work with,” Alessandra says. So on the wall with the most surface area, she chose the bold green.
The flooring was a DIY project.
Alessandra also installed the wood flooring herself, with the help of her dad, “which was a huge effort but incredibly rewarding,” she says. (This step happened during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, so it was hard to hire professionals to come into a home.)
“It felt special to create something personal — even if we made mistakes along the way,” Alessandra says, adding that the flooring step really made her feel like she created her home from scratch.
Vintage finds fill in a very open floor plan.
Alessandra says if she could change anything about her home’s renovation, she would make the living room take up less of the floor plan in the first place and give more square footage to bedrooms, bathrooms, etcetera. But for now she has a large living room to work with, and she used furniture to help create zones like a dining zone and a TV-watching zone.
Her vintage furniture collection comes from her family and from vintage markets — and she blends that with IKEA finds. Two of her favorite details in the room are the chairs (like the Panton chair) and lamps (Bruno Munari’s Falkland lamp, for example).
“I’m proud of how all these diverse pieces coexist,” Alessandra says. “It feels truly lived-in and personal.”
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