This Apartment Was Empty for Years. Here's What We Did With It.

Four months. That's how long it took us to turn this space into what it is now.

When we first walked through the door, the apartment had good bones and almost nothing else. Bare walls. A window with a view of the sea that nobody had looked through in years. Floors that had been covered instead of restored.

The Decision: Restore, Don't Renovate

Most rental apartments in Genova get the same treatment: white walls, IKEA furniture, a few prints from a homeware chain. Fast. Cheap. Forgettable. We decided early that we weren't interested in that.

We restored the original terrazzo floors instead of covering them. We chose linen over polyester. We kept the window frames in their original iron and painted them the same colour they had been in the 1960s — a detail that took three attempts to get right and that almost nobody will consciously notice, but that changes the feeling of the room completely.

What We Kept

The ceiling height. The original door handles. The view — which required us to refuse two proposed modifications that would have made the space more efficient but would have required cutting into the wall facing the sea. Some things are not negotiable.

What We Changed

Everything that had been added after the building's original construction and that didn't belong. A dropped ceiling that had been hiding original plasterwork. A partition wall that divided a large room into two small ones for no good reason. A bathroom that had been updated in the 1990s in a way that made everyone who used it slightly sad.

The Result

An apartment that feels like it has always been exactly this way. That's the highest compliment we can receive, and we've received it often: guests who ask how old the building is, who wonder if the floors are original, who sit in the morning light and say it feels like a place rather than a rental.

That feeling is what No Vacancy Genova is built on. Book directly at novacancygenova.com and arrive somewhere that was made with intention.