Frogner Apartment

The apartment fills the third floor of a 1910 brick block near Frognerparken, with tall windows to a quiet street and a courtyard at the back.

Decades of small alterations had cut it into a maze of corridors and closed rooms, and little of the street light ever reached the kitchen. The original plaster cornices and a pair of tiled stoves survived behind later boarding.

We removed the corridors and joined the rooms with a sequence of round arches, so daylight now travels from street to courtyard.

The walls are finished in hand-trowelled lime plaster in a single warm cream, which softens the edges and lets the arches read as one gesture. In the living room a stepped fireplace in the same plaster replaces a 1970s insert, and oak floors run unbroken through every room. Amara Okafor led the interior, down to the joinery and the lamps.