Every home that crossed a border has one thing that refuses to be replaced.

A worn red oriental rug on a bare concrete floor, a brown leather sofa beside it, and magnolias in bloom filling the window wall. — A house we designed that starts, unapologetically, with a red rug.

Maybe yours is a rug. Maybe it is a piano nobody plays, six boxes of books in a language your children are losing, or an ugly lamp you love beyond argument. It came with you, it has no place in the new flat, and giving it up is out of the question.

Furniture shops cannot help you with it. Most designers will politely work around it, the way one works around a radiator. We think it is the most important thing in the flat. It is the one object that is already yours, in a home that does not yet feel like it.

So that is where we start. Not with a style, not with a mood board — with the thing that refuses to be replaced, and with the way you actually live around it. The design grows outward from there, until the whole flat holds together the way that one object already does: obviously, stubbornly yours.

Briefs we are hoping someone brings us

the rug — from a grandmother's hallway, too red for the new sofa. The sofa loses.

the table — carried up four flights because dinners at it sound a particular way.

the light — you miss how afternoons fell in the old kitchen. Light can be designed.

the shelf — your daughter wants it at an angle everyone says is wrong. She is right.

the nothing — you brought nothing, and want the first thing that is truly yours. Also a brief.

Who is asking, and why

ZEIA is a small Romanian-Swiss architecture studio, run by the two of us. We design interiors in English, in Berlin and Leipzig, for people who have made a home somewhere that is not where they are from. We live between countries ourselves; we know what an object becomes when it is the only thing in the room that remembers where you come from.

The practical part is real too: we know what a German building will and will not allow, we speak German with the trades and English with you, and you see the cost behind every choice before it is made. But the practical part exists to serve the other part — the flat that finally answers when you walk in.

Tell us about the thing you kept.

Start there

One email, in English, about one object — or the lack of one. We will tell you honestly what we would build around it. Thirty minutes, no pitch.

hello@zeia-studio.de

ro +40 724 289 555

ch +41 76 738 38 91

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