Retro Apartment in Aix-en-Provence is a minimalist apartment located in Aix-en-Provence, France, designed by CHHO. Thomas Hostache and Bertrand Chapus took a generic four-room unit in a recent building near the city center and reduced it to three rooms, trading a bedroom for the dimensional generosity the plan had never been given.

Walnut panels wrap the entry into one continuous volume, absorbing doors, storage, and a bench upholstered in red Casal fabric into a single reading surface. The move borrows from the sealed cabinetry logic of late-sixties French apartment interiors, where designers like Michel Boyer treated a wall as furniture rather than partition. Nothing announces itself as a door. The compression here is deliberate, a dense passage that makes the release into the main space feel wider than the square footage suggests.

Opening the kitchen to the living area brought light into a previously closed service room, and the island holds the center of that new volume. Its Dekton Nacre top sits on a chromed tubular base, a sintered surface with almost no porosity paired with a support detail lifted directly from Bauhaus furniture vocabulary. The Wassily chairs a few meters away make the reference explicit, Marcel Breuer’s 1925 frame of bent chrome tube reappearing as structure rather than seating. Terrazzo-effect tile meets light oak parquet across the floor, and the transition between the two reads as a change in program rather than a boundary.

Marble Saarinen table, black leather Inga chairs, and the Wassily pair establish the dining group under a Fun pendant, whose mother-of-pearl discs scatter light in small irregular flashes across chrome and walnut grain. Verner Panton designed that fixture in 1964 using capiz shell, and its behavior depends on movement, each disc catching at a slightly different angle. Santa & Cole fixtures punctuate the circulation, spaced to keep the corridor from reading as a single unbroken run. Mirrors extend the walnut paneling into apparent depth, doubling the vertical rhythm without adding weight.