Art director Gioia Zloczower and her husband, Jonathan Evens, a product manager, were looking for comfort in the midst of profound global and personal shifts. “I was five months pregnant when we decided to move back to Vienna from San Francisco,” Gioia says. “We wanted to be close to my family, and to have a safe place for our daughter to call home.”

They were several months into the pandemic and their first pregnancy when they decided to return to Austria and seek out a place near Gioia’s childhood neighborhood. “Like so many others who moved during this time, we initially wanted a house with a garden in the 19th district, which is very green,” she says. “But when we heard of this apartment and saw that it had a rooftop terrace, we needed to see how we could make our own garden in the city.”

The apartment is set in an old Viennese building in the city’s ninth district, which appealed to the couple’s desire for history and entertainment. “It’s a quiet, urban area about 10 minutes from the center,” she says. “It’s our favorite area of Vienna, full of cute restaurants and cafes, and we always bump into someone we know.” The interior of the home was entirely modern, with four bedrooms and three bathrooms, but it had little storage and personality.

“There was no designated room to store everyday goods or clothes, and I didn’t want to cut away from the open space we had in our living area and bedrooms,” Gioia says.

Since this was also the couple’s first renovation, and there was “absolutely nothing when we moved in,” they found comfort in the expertise of interior designer Eva Beresin and carpenter Josef Proedl. They started by choosing a palette from the bottom up, and they landed on cream as the “base” of the home, with plans to layer on bold materials and rich wood.

“We knew we wanted a ‘loud’ shade in the kitchen, because we knew we wouldn’t get sick of eating with it,” she jokes. “The particular shade of green that we used throughout the apartment always reminds me of Vienna, and we knew when we moved back that we wanted to make that type of grand gesture.”

The team built shelves along entire walls for books and kitchenware, and updated the stairs with swaths of storage that almost completely disappear. The verdant hue the couple selected defines the kitchen, a bathroom, and the staircase, while intertwining with other pigments that coordinate with its confidence. Select white walls and furnishings balance it all out, creating a contrast that Gioia says still feels warm.

She took her time selecting pieces, aiming to avoid “buying everything from a catalog and moving in,” which meant that the process went a little slower than the rest of the team may have expected. “I think it’s so important to live in a space and see which furniture pieces should come next,” she says. “Which is why we still don’t have a dining room table.”

Beresin was on hand to draw up renderings and explain potential solutions, as well as to help them figure out how to get 6,000 pounds of green tile into their bathroom. “That was wild, but luckily no major problems happened,” Gioia says. “She also ran around the city for us, and answered a few panicked phone calls.”

The couple returned to the completed apartment in April 2021 with their daughter Zadie in tow, about six months after they purchased the place. “It was super important for us, especially Jonathan, to have a big kitchen,” she says. “We wanted our guests and family to gather around and sit for hours, and now the home invites that.”

Related Reading:

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This Cantilevered Home in Austria Takes In All the Views

Project Details:

Builder: Darmond Project Development

Lighting Design: Mattias Maringer, Licht Projekt

Interior Design: Eva Beresin / @evaberesin

Cabinetry Design: Josepf Proedl

Interior Photography: Melanie Kuglitsch / @wienerwohnsinn