After Italian artist Alessia De Pasquale bought a high-ceilinged, terrazzo-floored 1960s apartment in Athens’s Kypseli neighbourhood, she handed the keys to architect Dionisis Sotovikis, who she had met serendipitously at an exhibition held in his experimental workshop. Together they embarked on a collaborative renovation, with no drawings or designs, and most decisions made on site, on the spot. ‘He is more of an artist than an architect,’ she says of locally born Sotovikis, who studied architecture at the AA in London. ‘I totally trust his aesthetic.’
Her brief was loose and somewhat atypical: ‘Spacious, bright, calm, no corridor, no visible handles, a kitchen that doesn’t look like a kitchen, and a bathroom that doesn’t look like a bathroom,’ lists De Pasquale playfully, her criteria based on pure intuition. ‘I like curiosity; I tend to challenge the way things are used and give them a twist.’ And so, with this lodestar, the pair began to set the scene – first, knocking down all of the internal walls, yet leaving the old radiators in situ as floating, sculptural mementos.
They stripped away all but a faint trace of the ornate gold wallpaper (to the dismay of the octogenarian former owner) laying bare the unfinished texture of the original concrete beneath. The new open plan revealed a patchwork of floor types – white marble, terrazzo in both pink and green – remnants of former rooms, which they would embrace, filling in areas in need of repair with a grainy, cream-coloured cement. ‘Just like life itself, things evolve,’ reflects De Pasquale: ‘You take something off, you add something on.’
Originally from Taormina in Sicily, the owner moved to Athens five years ago to escape the unrelenting pace of London. She was seeking the space, both mentally and literally, to develop her artistic language, after moving on in 2015 from her career as a menswear designer for cult British fashion behemoths such as Paul Smith, Burberry and Aquascutum. It worked, and her multi-disciplinary, concept-led art practice expanded in both its creative breadth and scale – most recently to designing bespoke furniture pieces under ADP Studio – thanks to her two-level 200sq m studio and the close-knit and resourceful local community of makers she now has at her fingertips (thriving, she believes, in the absence of Amazon and Ebay in Greece).
Her home-buying process coincided with the pandemic, two events that prompted her to seriously reflect, both practically and philosophically, upon the question: ‘What is home beyond the walls of a house?’ She played out her thinking through her artistic practice; examining the paradox of the home as a place at once of freedom and confinement, she created a series of 40 small sculptures made of found household objects such as tubes and pipes, bound together using shibari rope-tying techniques. ‘The Japanese cultural practice was born of torture, yet used as a sexual practice. To me it represented the confinement of home during the pandemic, playing between restriction and liberation, function and pleasure.’
The apartment became an ‘artefact, an artwork in itself and a stage’ for her exploration of the home as a sensation, a memory, a person, a city. As a result, it has a curiously performative nature, often existing playfully in the space between familiarity and discovery – or as the internet might term it, IYKYK (if you know, you know). Custom-designed by Sotovikis, the neat galley kitchen is a precise metal box: a ‘room within a room’ of discreet cupboards and doors (no handles). There’s a circular metal dining table attached to the ceiling by a pole, around which 11 people gathered for New Year’s dinner. Guests must beware after a few glasses, though – there’s absolutely no toilets in sight (one is tucked under a wooden shelf and another smoothly concealed in a closet). Indeed, in a moment of desperation one friend had to crawl on her hands and knees looking for pipes to locate one. ‘It made me a little proud in a silly way,’ says De Pasquale with a laugh. ‘The bathroom really didn’t look like a bathroom.’
The apartment also encourages an internal act of stripping back, an exposing and confronting of the self, in a way perhaps most palpably felt within the spaces of intimacy. Stepping nude inside the principal bathroom’s light-framed shower completes a theatrical Ancient Greek tableau with a painted amphora (doubling up as a laundry basket). The former 1960s baby blue ceramic bathtub finds a surreal new home on the balcony, where de Pasquale has ice bath parties in summer and synth pianist Maria Chiara Argirò shot her nocturnal album cover.
The guest shower is lined entirely with mirrors, objects that appear frequently in De Pasquale’s art work. ‘You see a million versions of yourself, parts of your body you’ve never seen before.’ There’s no mirror, however, above her bathroom sink, a salvaged stone piece that sits within an interior window connecting bathroom and bedroom. While cleaning her teeth, De Pasquale likes to look at her partner of 17 years, Hong Kong-born artist HIN, who stands opposite. ‘Some people might not find it functional, but it represents me and how I want to live,’ she explains of all of these idiosyncrasies, ‘When I walk into the apartment, I feel like I’m inside myself.’ (HIN also feels like he is living inside her, she says, but that’s exactly why he likes it so much.)
De Pasquale extended the invitation for others to explore the space (and their inner selves) in her 2023 exhibition Home, coinciding with the Athens Open House festival, in which she continues to participate. For her show, she presented a series of site-specific installations, with a hybrid chair titled The Compromise taking centre stage. Probing the nuances of the interior and exterior self, the piece imagines someone crossing the threshold of their home, shifting it from a vertical to a horizontal experience, where one half of the chair is a jacket and the other half mirrors the naked body; the onlooker becomes part of a performance work by sitting in the chair.
‘When you leave the house, you put on a mask – your bra, your shoes and your persona. Your own reality, and the reality you show to the outside world: they are both your realities.’ So, while the home holds the power to induce an intricate kind of self-discovery, perhaps there is an equal, opposite power in its boundary and the dimensions beyond it, too – because this story just had to end with a conceptual plot twist.
For more information about Alessia De Pasquale, visit alessiadepasquale.com
Sign up for our weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive interiors stories like this one, direct to your inbox
