Inside a heritage-listed residential building on the slopes of Mtatsminda, Unit 20 by studio2AM echoes Tbilisi’s layered landscape through a compact interior where history and contemporary inhabitation overlap. Exposed brick anchors a precise landscape of stainless steel and plywood, while shifts in scale turn surfaces into objects and architecture into furniture. Conceived for the rental market, the 38-square-metre apartment treats heritage not as a fixed image, but as an evolving condition.
Mtatsminda is one of Tbilisi’s most spatially distinctive quarters, occupying the lower slopes of the mountain of the same name above the historic centre. Its urban character emerged largely through the city’s nineteenth-century expansion beyond its older medieval fabric, when more regular European planning principles began to reshape Tbilisi. Yet perhaps Mtatsminda’s strongest architectural element is not planning, but topography itself.
Buildings rarely appear here as autonomous objects. They negotiate differences in level, step along streets, settle onto terraces or disappear partially into the hillside. The result is an architecture of section rather than façade. Mtatsminda is experienced vertically—through ascent and descent, thresholds, compressed passages, sudden openings and constantly shifting horizons. The mountain is therefore not simply the district’s backdrop; it operates as its primary architectural infrastructure, producing a neighbourhood in which landscape, dwelling and city seem to have grown into one another.
Architecturally, Mtatsminda is defined less by a single style than by layering and hybridisation.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century houses combine European classical, Renaissance-Baroque, eclectic and occasionally Art Nouveau vocabularies with distinctly Tbilisian domestic traditions. This coexistence of European façades with the courtyard-and-balcony culture of Tbilisi is one of the historic city’s defining architectural characteristics.
It is within this accumulated context that studio2AM shapes Unit 20, a 38-square-metre apartment in the heart of Mtatsminda, housed within a residential building officially designated as a cultural-heritage monument.
“Unit 20 continues a series of projects that reconsider what it means to design for the contemporary rental market and, in this case, within historically charged contexts. Respect for the building’s history was a key design principle,” state the architects.
The question is a particularly contemporary one: how does one design a temporary form of inhabitation within architecture carrying a much longer memory?
Rental housing is, by definition, occupied through succession. Its inhabitants arrive and depart; their routines, objects and domestic configurations continually change. Heritage, conversely, appears to demand permanence. Yet the two conditions are not necessarily oppositional. Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn proposed that buildings endure precisely because they are capable of changing, while more recent heritage scholarship has extended this argument to protected housing itself: preservation can be understood not as the suspension of a building in time, but as the careful management of its continued evolution. In Unit 20, permanence and transience are therefore brought into productive tension.
Architecture preserves what carries memory while leaving enough spatial freedom for lives it cannot anticipate.
Working through reinterpretation, research and reinvention, studio2AM reorganised the compact apartment as an open-plan interior anchored by an exposed, rough fragment of the existing brick masonry. Left deliberately unresolved, it becomes the material—and almost spiritual—centre of the new home: a fragment through which the apartment remains mnemonically connected to the rugged landscape beyond, to Mtatsminda’s retaining walls, masonry houses and cobbled streets.
Around this rough nucleus, the new interior unfolds as a precise domestic installation of stainless steel and plywood, explored through variations in form, texture and tone.
Old and new are not disguised as one another. Instead, their difference becomes productive: the irregularity of brick meets the precision of sheet metal; weathered matter encounters calibrated joinery; the accumulated time of the building confronts the smooth surfaces of contemporary occupation.
“It’s interesting how the same material feels different at each scale. This approach highlights how its character can transform as its dimensions shift,” explain the architects.
Here, scale alters the way matter is perceived. A material encountered as a surface is not the same material encountered as an object, a joint or something held in the hand. At Unit 20, repetition produces difference. Plywood moves from large enclosing planes to smaller accents; stainless steel expands across the bathroom, kitchen and wardrobe before contracting into the intimate scale of a bedside table, handle, candle holder or entrance shelf. The material remains chemically the same, yet phenomenologically it changes. At one scale it constructs space; at another, it meets the body.
This oscillation between scales creates continuity without monotony.
Rather than multiplying materials to distinguish functions, studio2AM asks a limited palette to perform differently: as background and object, infrastructure and ornament, architecture and furniture.
“Custom-built furniture defines distinct zones for resting, dining, hosting friends or quietly reading, allowing the apartment to adapt seamlessly to different rhythms of daily life. Each piece is designed specifically for its location, often serving multiple functions at once—seating, storage—allowing the apartment to remain flexible and efficient,” says studio2AM.
Within only 38 square metres, flexibility becomes less a matter of movable partitions than of understanding inhabitation as an architecture of appropriation where space acquires generosity when it gives its occupants the freedom to determine how it will be used.
Custom furniture establishes territories without sealing them into rooms; resting, eating, reading, working and receiving friends coexist within a continuous field, allowing domestic life to shift without requiring architecture to prescribe every movement.
Embracing the characteristic verticality of Mtatsminda, Unit 20 is organised around generous views towards the surrounding urban landscape. Seating is integrated along the windows, turning the act of looking outward into an everyday ritual.
The window becomes more than an aperture: it is somewhere to sit, pause and locate oneself.
The distant city is drawn into the intimacy of the apartment, grounding the inhabitant within a geography much larger than its 38 square metres.
Against the muted natural palette of greys and browns, blue appears almost unexpectedly—a moment of chromatic intensity within an otherwise restrained material world.
A semicircular blue table, anchored to the rectangular timber surface framing the sleeping area, forms a precise composition and an autonomous little world for everyday rituals. Blue cabinet handles and a bespoke, hand-sewn knitted bedcover repeat the colour at progressively more intimate scales, completing a quiet romance between beige, silver and blue.
Tiptoeing between domesticity, material experimentation and cultural inheritance, Unit 20 belongs neither entirely to the past nor emphatically to the new.
Instead, studio2AM treats inhabitation as another layer within the building’s longer biography—temporary enough to accommodate lives yet unknown, precise enough to leave its own trace. In a neighbourhood where architecture has always negotiated between mountain and city, permanence and transformation, Unit 20 proposes that heritage might be understood in much the same way: not as the preservation of a fixed image, but as the careful continuation of a life already in progress.
Facts & Credits
Project title Unit 20
Typology Interiors, Micro-scale, Apartment Renovation, Rental Housing
Location Mtatsminda, Tbilisi, Georgia
Area 38 m²
Date 2025
Architecture studio2AM
Photography Grigory Sokolinski