House with Reflective Furniture is a minimalist apartment renovation located in Rome, Italy, designed by set architects. The challenge confronting Set Architects in Rome’s Nomentano district was a familiar one in the city’s older residential stock: an early 20th-century apartment organized around a sequence of hermetically sealed rooms, load-bearing walls enforcing a domestic logic that no longer matched how a young family intended to live. Four-meter ceilings and generous proportions offered latent spatial potential, but the plan itself resisted openness. Rather than working against this resistance wholesale, the practice read it selectively – two new structural openings thread the kitchen, dining room, living room, and relaxation area into a continuous field, while a system of full-height folding panels and sliding doors preserves the ability to re-close, to restore separation and privacy as occasion demands.
This approach to reconfigurability recalls the Japanese tradition of fusuma screens, where spatial division is never fixed but negotiated. The result is an apartment that operates at two registers simultaneously: open and interconnected as a daily default, subdivided when the household requires it. The movable elements carry both functional and conceptual weight, functioning as the project’s primary architectural gesture.
Set Architects also made a deliberate choice about what not to change. The original wooden doors with their colored glass inserts remain in place, as do the decorative plaster ceiling moldings – elements that carry the building’s early 20th-century character without apology. Preservation here is not pastiche but a form of material honesty, acknowledging that the apartment’s identity predates the intervention and will outlast it.
