A few years ago, Monika and Michal, their two children and their whippet, Donn, decided they were fed up with Warsaw. “We wanted to slow down seriously,” says Monika. Fortunately, she and Michal had the option to work from home, which meant that moving to a smaller, slower-paced city within Poland was a very real possibility. The coastal city of Gdansk topped his list: equally ideal for windsurfing in the summer and long walks along the beach in the winter. However, finding a home there was another matter. “We’d been looking for two years when we saw an ad for this one,” Michal says of her current home, a 937-square-foot townhouse circa 1978. “When we walked in, we knew right away it was the one. It was six minutes from the beach and was surrounded by vegetation.” What they didn’t know was the amount of work it would take to bring him back to life.
There was a lot to love about the house, but so much that wasn’t. Built during communist rule, when brick and building materials were scarce and of poor quality, some of its walls had been badly compromised with broken bricks, crumpled newspapers and cement. The couple would need help fixing the bones, and luckily they knew just the person to lend it: interior designer Katja Sadziak of Warsaw-based ID Studio, with whom they had already worked on their Warsaw home. For Katja, the priority was to get rid of some internal walls, partly because they were so weak and partly to open up the footprint. More space meant more space for storage, something the designer took advantage of by installing floor-to-ceiling built-in units, hidden in the bedrooms and left open in the common areas. She also brought home many of the accents and furniture she had designed for the family’s previous home in Warsaw in a way that felt true to her new one in Gdansk. “Now we have enough space to host lots of guests as well as sleepovers for the boys’ friends, which is an amazing improvement,” shares Monika.
