ZOZULKA

30 sq.m

Lviv, Ukraine | 2023

Design: Iryna Bilohan

Photo: Yevhenii Avramenko

“Zozulka” (in Ukrainian, this word means a little cuckoo bird) - I remember how my granny gently called me that word when I was a child. But this is more than a gentle way to address a person. It also stands for care, attention, and stories that are well-known to people, as well as those that should be kept a secret and that you can’t tell anyone. It stands for the feeling of being home, so I called it that way.

My home is a small apartment in a building of the kind that was built in the 1960s-90s for families and offering tiny spaces with a hotel-like feeling. It’s located in the middle of a residential area in Lviv, and like each of us, it had potential. I wanted to bring it to life, so I made a re-planning decision, and just like that, the contractors carefully dismantled the wall between the kitchen and the room and enlarged the bathroom. Bright light entered the space, and Zozulka spread her wings.

I believe that every space has its nature. It hides in the perfect and not-that-perfect details, and you can say the same about people. We admit that Zozulka’s walls and floors are completely uneven, but out of respect for her and without even mentioning the available budget, I decided not to interfere much with her peculiarities. The walls were not leveled or plastered; they were only repainted.

The floor is covered by a preserved and beautifully textured parquet laid in a herringbone pattern. We first cleaned it and then renewed its varnish. In places where no parquet was left, the floor was decorated with a quartz coating. This made it possible for the two flooring materials to fit together, taking into account uneven walls and floors.

I found ceramic tiles for the bathroom and kitchen backsplash on OLX (a Ukrainian marketplace for new and used goods, similar to eBay). There, I also found the glass blocks that now let the light into the bathroom and create a warm solar canvas on its wall.

Only the kitchen and the sleeping bed were created from scratch; however, they serve the space, and their novelty is not the center of their surroundings. They had to organically blend in with the items with history and were made of tinted birch plywood.

Every day, we are surrounded by dozens of objects. Some exist in the background, while others are storytellers. Zozulka is filled with the latter, and they tell me the following.

The oak table with a small drawer remembers as my dad used to have lunch as a child and, like all children, used to spin around on a chair. A local craftsman called Ludwig made this table 60 years ago. It heard many conversations and welcomed many people; now, it is a part of my home.

I value noticing existing things, prolonging their lives, or giving them a new one. Once, I saw an upholstered chair in the street’s dumpster, its frame was still solid and acceptable, so I only had to replace the filling and upholstery fabric. Two other chairs, originally from Stryi (a small town some 70 km from Lviv), caught my eye on OLX; I only made new pillows for those. It’s hard for me to imagine that they could simply disappear, as the story of their rescue adds a unique value to their existence.

The varnished cabinet remembers my grandparents' delight in moving into their long-awaited apartment. Various artisans complemented the cabinet multiple times, and not for nothing – at over 50, she is holding on tight and looks new. Like the cabinet in the bathroom, it was made around 1970 at the Drohobych (another small town not far from Lviv) furniture enterprise "The Carpathians" by the Ukrainian Society of the Deaf.

A globe lamp spied on how my grandfather carved wooden caskets. And many more things, such as boards, vases, glasses, plates, and pots, fill the space and preserve the warmth of family memories.

And all of this creates my Zozulka.

before / after

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