Architecture is like music and cake, says the man behind CTP’s Ponávka by DOMEQ interior design in Brno

The collaboration between Bart Vos and CTP, in cooperation with studio Acht, represents a shift in Brno’s interior landscape moving away from sterile development toward soulful, functional architecture. By moving beyond the initial success of DOMEQ, Vos has utilized Ponávka to challenge the standards of the modern workplace. His approach treats commercial space as a living ecosystem where history and modernity coexist. 

There is an infectious yet calm energy to the way Bart Vos speaks about his work. As the fourth generation of a family business that evolved from furniture-making into a dual interior studio and architecture practice.

This conviction bridges the gap between his grandfather’s original furniture shop and the expansive modern projects he leads today.

His relationship with CTP began through a shared sensibility rather than a formal brief. Both Bart Vos, architect, and Remon Vos, CTP’s CEO, grew up in Groningen in the north of the Netherlands. “Remon told me that when he was young, he always looked through the windows in our shop, and as a young guy already admired design and beauty,” Bart Vos recalls. “That history created a shortcut to trust. When a client already speaks your language, you can skip the formalities. We don’t need a heavy brief. We have a shared intuition for how a space should feel.”

Bart Vos

Vos approaches his projects like a 3D composition involving three ingredients: the landscape, the architecture, and the interior. “It’s almost like painting where you think about the frame as much as the content. A building designed without considering the surroundings is a bad approach, but CTP brings all three together. To do that, the client must be my ‘co-architect’, and we involve the whole team from the artisan to the carpenter. Even without a huge budget, you have to be creative,” describes Vos.

DOMEQ: Designing for students
The first of the two projects, DOMEQ, was conceived as student housing. CTP’s idea was to create a genuine community for young people arriving from different countries, and Vos was brought in to make the shared spaces actually work.

The centrepiece of the project was a shared kitchen designed as a social anchor rather than a utility. While the concept of bringing students from different cultures and routines together around a single table was initially met with scepticism, Vos viewed the communal act of making food as essential for building a genuine community – And he was right. The space filled up, people used it exactly as intended, and then in ways nobody anticipated. “For me, the only measure of success that counts is not whether something looks right in a rendering, but whether people actually inhabit it,” says Vos. “If a space is full, it works. That’s the best feedback you can possibly receive.”

Ponávka: A lobby isn’t a showroom!
With DOMEQ established and thriving, CTP turned its attention to the next logical step. Students at DOMEQ graduate. They begin their careers, look for apartments, and want offices that don’t feel like offices. Ponávka was designed with those people in mind – Young professionals who had already been shaped by a certain expectation of how a space should feel.

While preparing the interior design, Vos took a slightly shocking approach by eliminating the reception desk entirely. He rejects the conventional idea that lobbies are merely hollow transition spaces you pass through on the way to where you actually want to be. Instead, he argues and his work in Brno demonstrates that a lobby should be a focal point: a place to meet, to work between appointments, or to pause without a specific purpose. The space was allowed to evolve by replacing the traditional ‘gatehouse’ ritual with a digital check-in. Without a desk anchoring the room, colour and art arrived alongside a public bookcase that functions as a free library; an open invitation rather than a service transaction.

Spaces are like cake
Antique furniture was placed alongside contemporary pieces. “A lobby furnished entirely with new pieces tends to feel dull. But if you introduce even one genuinely old armchair, the room gains a soul that new objects simply cannot provide,” observes Vos. The question of durability also runs through Vos’s thinking about both objects and spaces. Good furniture is expensive precisely because it endures; not just physically, but culturally. “We still use pieces by Le Corbusier or Charles Eames not because they are fashionable, but because they have outlasted fashion entirely,” notes Vos. “I compare a room to a cake. The architecture and the room are cake, and the furniture is the cream. Together they are great, but the furniture should never ‘make’ the room. Architecture, colour, and light are 90-95% of the look.”

Colours are like music
“Colours are often underestimated. People usually just pick a random green or blue for different floors. I told CTP: ‘Let’s make a palette of eight colours used throughout the entire building.’ We create a composition of colour architecture. It’s not a ‘yellow floor’ or a ‘green floor’. It’s about the atmosphere and recognition. I don’t see colours as mere decoration. I see it as function. A yellow wall is a tool that affects your mood and energy. It changes the quality of the conversation you are about to have before you’ve even said a word,” says Vos, who once designed a hospital using twenty-five different colours.