How They Pulled It Off: A Mirrored Wall That Lets the Sun In—and Hides a Home Office

Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.

When the Italian architecture firm Perotta Iberto Architetti, also known as PIA, began working with a client who needed both a home and a home office, they knew they were in for a challenge.

"The homeowner had specifically requested a dedicated work-from-home space that was as separate as possible from the rest of the apartment," explains Alessandro Perotta.

PIA and the client, a freelance cultural project manager, worked together to find the perfect property—and when they spotted a 60 square meter apartment that offered a stunning view of the city, they knew they had found the right place. With early 20th-century architectural elements such as arched wooden windows, original wooden doors and parts of the original terrazzo flooring still intact, PIA began developing a plan that would allow the space to be modified just enough to meet a modern client’s needs.

The first step was to swap the kitchen and the bathroom. "There was a tiny, totally inadequate bathroom," says Perotta. "We simply swapped the two rooms, slightly shifting the dividing wall between them, to allow for a larger bathroom with a bathtub and a kitchenette in close connection with the living room."

The next step was to build the home office—and PIA quickly realized that if they used mirrored doors to separate the office from the rest of the apartment, they could solve two architectural issues with one simple design.

"Right from the start it occurred to us to take advantage of the blind corner, which also happened to be the widest part of the hallway leading to the various rooms, all of which face south," Perotta says. "We thought that this kind of study space, tucked in a corner, could on one hand support better focus, and on the other, act as a kind of device to bring both the light and the view from the living room into the hallway and entrance."