Khrystyna Badzian and shades of old wood. Sadolin: Careful, painted!

Our new heroine is the architect Khrystyna Badzian. Together with her husband Dmytro Sorokevich, they founded the company Replus Bureau, which is based in Lviv and London. Khrystyna also created Restare, an architectural salvage workshop that preserves and restores elements of authenticity, vintage furniture and decor. The team collects old tiles, doors, windows, latches, chairs, cabinets where they are no longer needed, and sometimes they just find them in the dumps. Everything is cleaned, repaired, restored and given a new life to these things.

Khrystyna considers the popularization of respect for antiquity to be her own cultural mission. Working with modern projects, Replus integrates expressive authentic elements into them. This approach has become one of the company's hallmarks.

Rocking horse

I was born and grew up in Lviv in a family with average wealth. My mother has a trade and economic education, in modern language she can be called a marketer. My father worked on the railway all his life. He has golden hands and is a talented craftsman - locksmith and welder. And he always had a knack for construction. The house in which our family lived was built by my father himself. Nearby, he built a bathhouse and a whole complex with a small pool.

The construction theme has been familiar to me since childhood. It helped when I started visiting construction sites as an architect. Besides, I could always consult with my father.

At school I loved mathematics and especially geometry. She was fond of drawing, but it was at the level of a hobby. I didn't dream about architecture, because I didn't know that such a profession existed until a certain time. There were no creative people in my family and close circle, let alone architects.

I did not dream about architecture, because until a certain time I did not know that such a profession existed

Arbre de la liberte

In the ninth grade, several classmates and I were sent on an exchange to France. There I lived for a week in the city of Lille in the family of an architect. He gave me a tour of his office. Then I was surprised that there is such an unusual work, where people draw something wise while standing behind the kulmans.

When I graduated from school, the popular professions were lawyers, economists, and bankers. My parents also set me on this path. I passed the entrance exams to one of the Lviv academies immediately after the preparatory courses. It was April, and the whole summer is ahead. Once I was invited to go for a walk by a friend who was dating a guy a few years older. He took us to show the faculty of architecture where he studied. My eyes just opened. I remembered the architect's office in France and realized that this is what I want to do in life.

Parents were categorically against. They believed that girls do not study architecture, and that I would not find a job later. It helped that I already had a plan A of passing my banking exams, so I was allowed to try. Parents gave $150 for a drawing and drawing tutor. In two months, I prepared and entered the budget. Mother and father reconciled: they asked friends, learned that the Middle Ages had ended, and the girls were studying architecture. They decided that, as a last resort, I would work as an interior designer, and this seemed like a more acceptable option.

Sequoia is evergreen

In the second year, I went to the USA for four months under the Work&Travel program. Together with my girlfriend, we worked at McDonald's and at the Krispy Kreme Donuts chain.

This was an important lesson for me. First, I was impressed by the automation of processes and corporate rules of these companies. For example, the fact that when there are no customers, the cashier does not stand still, but has to clean up near the cash register, move the furniture and wash after it, and shuffle something around.

In order to be on time, they woke up at 4.30:XNUMX a.m. and arrived at the office at six in the morning. By nine o'clock we had maximum productivity

Second, I made money. She canceled the trip, bought a laptop, and still had some money left over for pocket expenses. And most importantly, I came back motivated. I understood: if I can make money at McDonald's, then I can do it in a more qualified job. Then I started looking for something by profession.

Starting from the third year, I managed to work in several architectural studios. The last one was Chaplinsky and Partners, where I headed the interior department.

The first sprouts

When my husband and I founded our own office, we both already had considerable experience. It was extremely stressful to start. They were most worried that there would be no orders or that they would be small and uninteresting requests. We gave ourselves a deadline of two months to understand whether it is even realistic for us. Our "airbag", 15 thousand hryvnias left over from the wedding, was lying on the shelf. We bought a computer and rented the first office. It was a one-room apartment, where, in addition to us, there was also a colleague who was starting his own business, as well as one senior architect who came from time to time. I decided that if the job didn't work out, I would enroll in tester courses and retrain in IT.

The first client was brought by our contractor - he needed to design a roof. Later, the entire building and a large interior were added to the roof. Then came two more clients with large reconstruction projects. For the first year, we worked together with Dmytro. They made the drawings and visualizations themselves and conducted the author's supervision, which was essentially a general contract. One of the objects was reconstruction, where workers could not hang out, smoke or walk in yesterday's stale uniform. We visited the construction site every day and monitored everything.

In order to be on time, they woke up at 4.30:XNUMX a.m. and arrived at the office at six in the morning. By nine o'clock we had maximum productivity, and then the calls and trips to the facilities began. There were more and more customers. It's time to recruit people for the team and move to a bigger office.

Carved doors

From the beginning, we had many objects in the old fund. Apartments, night club, several restaurants. We love renovation, and most of all, when the premises are old and complex.

Our office is now located in a 1914 building designed by Karel Boublik on Cathedral Square in Lviv. This is the former apothecary's apartment, located above the "Pharmacy-Museum". A room that has survived to our time without any special interventions or repairs. It has authentic moldings and classical doors with carvings and decorative moldings.

Somehow I thought about the fact that modern doors, rectangular, tall and elegant, we can design for our objects in three seconds. But if the customer wants classic proportions, similar to our old doors, it will be a difficult task. I looked at all these cuts, details and curls and realized how much skill and experience they had. They were created in the days when a carpenter passed his planers and cutters to his children as an inheritance. The same with metal gates or classic parquet.

We love renovation, and most of all, when the premises are old and complex

In our office, the parquet boards have a wood inlay of three shades. If I wanted to install such a parquet in one of our projects now, it would be unreal money, and it was also expensive before. In addition, it is worth considering that the parquet was laid in times when there was no electric lighting in the house. We need to preserve these old elements, at least until we learn how to do it with the same quality.

At some point, I realized that I was not wearing anything in classical proportions. In order to close this gap, I went to courses on the history of Lviv, which were conducted by architectural researcher Tetyana Kazantseva. She talks so freely and humorously about the beauty of abandoned shabby houses that you start to love them too.

Ms. Tatiana emphasized the golden rule: if the house was built before 1930, then before you raze everything to zero, you should rub the wall with a spatula: most likely, you will find old paintings. If the walls were not covered with brick during previous repairs, the paintings should be preserved. Immediately after the lecture, I checked it in our office. Paintings were in every room.

Buy antique furniture inexpensively on OLX

I have developed a great respect for authenticity. We have changed the approach in working with the old fund. Now, if we needed to dismantle the original parquet on the site, we did not throw it away. The same with bricks, doors, moldings. Everything that was of good quality and valuable, we collected and stored in the garage, in order to later use these elements in other projects. Our master contractors also called if something like that was thrown away at one of their facilities. I hired a separate person - the head of the farm. When acquaintances were dropping photos of the next garbage can, I called him: "Mr. Mykhailo, two doors were thrown out on Saksaganskyi. Go."

The best Replus Bureau properties to date, like the Lviv Municipal Center, are a mix of old and new. For example, in our own apartment, a Bulthaup kitchen with aluminum fronts sits next to a turn-of-the-century cabinet I found on OLX. On the closet there is a wooden church cross left by the former residents of the apartment.

If the house was built before 1930, then you should rub the wall with a spatula: most likely you will find old paintings

Very soon it became clear that the volumes of authentic things that people throw away in Lviv are much larger than what is needed for our facilities. Because, first of all, we create modern design, where authentic elements only become accents. We quickly filled two garages and the attic above our apartment with vintage. At some point, I no longer remembered what we had where.

So, two years ago, I created the Restare workshop. This is a separate company engaged in the collection and restoration of furniture, doors, tiles and other authentic elements that remained in old Lviv houses and are no longer needed. We study these things, clean them, repair them, sell them and send them to a new life.

Carpenter ant

I was confused that issues of preservation of historical values ​​are mostly handled by older people. Only they understand what is valuable and what is not, and which objects cannot be touched at all. In order to change the stereotype, I decided to research these questions myself and popularize respect for the old. Because today, with all the modern equipment and technologies, we are still far from the level of quality that was maintained a hundred years ago.

For example, it is now impossible to order a three-meter high wooden door. All machines are designed for 2,7 meters. Making the door higher so that it does not slide or twist is a super difficult task. And a hundred years ago, this was done qualitatively, and all processes were established. Those doors still stand in Austrian and Polish tenements.

At the beginning of Kopernyka Street in Lviv there is a building of the National Bank. The plaster on its walls is more than a hundred years old, and nothing is missing from it - there is not a single crack on the facade. The layer of plaster is two centimeters thick, it shines a little in the sun, because mica was added to the mixture.

At my first job, one of the projects was a functionalist house. The customer wanted to reproduce the traditional appearance of the facade and cover it with old-tech plaster.

In our apartment, a Bulthaup kitchen with aluminum facades stands next to a cabinet from the beginning of the last century

Good idea! I went to the library - deaf. I called Tetyana Kazantseva, who taught with me in the first year. She said it's unrealistic because people write dissertations trying to guess such recipes. The composition itself can be found out by examining a piece of plaster under a microscope in some research institute. But the technology is also important—does that surface need to be wetted, wiped, or sanded after four hours? How exactly to mix, at what temperature - there are a lot of points that need to be taken into account.

When Soviet power came to Lviv, everything that belonged to Poland and Austria-Hungary was called bad. Documents with records of those recipes and technologies were simply collected and burned. At the beginning of the XNUMXth century, the office of Ivan Levinskyi, perhaps the most outstanding local architect of that time, worked in Lviv. He had a carpentry shop, a glass shop, a metal shop, a ceramic shop and a brick workshop. And today you would like to make such high-quality bricks, but there is no recipe, the technology has been lost, and there is no one to ask.

London plane trees

I got to London for the first time in 2017 and immediately dreamed of having an office there. At first, it seemed unattainable, but in January 2022, Dmytro and I went to London again and decided that there was nothing to wait - we needed to register a company there and somehow start moving. The documents stating that our company was opened and entered in the general register arrived on February 23.

On February 24, we were in a complete stupor - we didn't know if the profession of architect was even needed now, we gathered in the office, bought pneumatics, knives and gas canisters. Our team consists of 20 people, it is a cool and powerful team that needed to be preserved.

Then I realized that it was not in vain that we opened that company in London, we had to go. Together with four girls-architects from the office, we first went to Budapest to apply for British visas, because mine had just expired. My four-year-old daughter and mother went with me to help with the baby.

I would like universal houses to exist, like cars or smartphones

Friends found temporary housing for us in Budapest, as well as an office where we could come to work. In March, we started writing to local architects, going to meet them and selling ourselves as an office. If we were looking for work separately, as four separate female architects, we would get a job in one day.

We visited all Budapest architectural offices and received an order for a lobby project for a bank. It was like candy for a crying baby: we calmed down a bit and believed that everything would work out. There were negotiations on two more projects, but presence was important there. We got visas and moved on.

In London, we followed the same path: we wrote letters to ten architectural firms whose contacts we found on ArchDaily. Of course, Norman Foster's studio was among them, but we got an answer from a lesser-known bureau. The architect treated us favorably and introduced us to his colleagues, so we had enough contacts.

We met, showed our projects, made sure that in general we are on the same level. The scale of our works may differ, but the level of execution, principled decisions and budgets are quite comparable. My complexes that architects in London work according to some other rules that we do not know have finally disappeared. Their drawings are the same in millimeters, they work the same in Autocad and SketchUp, and in an informal conversation it turned out that their problems with contractors are the same as ours.

Now every month I go to London for two weeks with one of my colleagues. We have facilities there, including two apartments and the Mriya restaurant, created by the famous chef Yuriy Kovryzhenko. In addition, we are negotiating a small sports complex for paddle tennis. This is a new popular sport - something like court tennis without rules.

We want to create projects that will compete at the first level. Not to copy someone, but to design so that someone later wants to copy our idea

A sign on a pub

London won me over with its respect for tradition. This is a town where you can see a pub with a sign from 1680. There, the names of the streets on the facades of the houses are engraved on the stone, and they are never renamed. I like the pipes leading out of the houses, black facades and fences, left-hand traffic, separate faucets for cold and hot water. The most impressive thing is that all this is not exchanged for something new and more convenient. If those two taps work and you've learned how to use them, why change them?

For me, London is the capital where design is created. All major architectural studios have offices in London. All rich people want to buy housing there.

Earlier, we looked at some new ideas on the Internet and wanted to implement them here in Lviv. But now I want to create projects that will compete at that first level. Not to copy someone, but to design so that someone later wants to copy our idea.

Bonsai houses

Sometimes I get the feeling that many people, like bots, work in parallel on the same projects and solve the same problems in different countries and different cities. Especially when it comes to private housing.

When they come to us to design a house, the request sounds something like this: a large living room, a bedroom with a wardrobe, a large bathroom, all with windows, a bedroom for each child and another guest bedroom. This is a universal formula for comfortable housing. None of the clients has yet asked us for something completely different. For example, make a photo lab in the house and all the rooms without windows.

I would like architects to have no need to design the same thing over and over again. For universal houses to exist, like cars or smartphones. Because the iPhone is suitable for many people, Madonna, the mayor and I have it, although we are all different people with different wealth, it covers the needs of each of us. It's the same with cars - in a certain class, you choose between several models and you don't want to build yourself some completely different device from scratch. I wish there were universal "iPhone houses" that would satisfy a large number of people. So that there was a certain number of such solutions on the market, and it was possible to simply call and order a house. And when it wears out, it is easy to dismantle it and bring a new one.

We create modern design where authentic elements become accents

There were many similar ideas in the history of architecture, the same Le Corbusier worked in this direction. Perhaps artificial intelligence will help us to implement this in practice. I would like to take part in the training of this artificial intelligence.

 

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