Contemporary Georgian style interior design in Batumi apartments

Where Georgian interior style comes from

Georgia has no ready-made historical interior that can be moved into an apartment wholesale. The starting points are the country's architecture and crafts: the carved wooden balconies of old Tbilisi houses, the wooden oda houses of western Georgia, glazed ceramics, woven rugs and felt, chased metalwork and cloisonné enamel. Georgian craftspeople still make chased metalwork, a relief hammered out of a sheet of metal, and enamel today. It is from pieces like these, made now, that we put together a contemporary Georgian interior, without trying to imitate an old house.

A calm base and a place for craftspeople's work

The base of this interior is contemporary: light walls, a simple floor, furniture without carving or gilding, closed storage. Against it, three to five local pieces for the whole apartment stand out well, one main piece per room. In the living room it might be a rug or a felt wall panel, in the bedroom a carved wooden headboard, in the kitchen handmade ceramics on an open shelf.

In the design we give each piece its place in advance: a wall or niche with dimensions, lighting, a fixing method and a socket if the piece is a lamp. Then the piece doesn't have to look for a corner after the renovation, and the room is built around it. If a piece is commissioned from a craftsperson, they get a sketch with dimensions from us, and we put the lead time they give into the renovation schedule.

Georgian style interior design in an apartment by the sea

Under the modest ceiling of a new build, dark carved wood on every wall feels oppressive. We keep wood to one wall or the headboard, and make ceiling beams light or the same tone as the boards on the wall. Board preparation and fixing with expansion gaps are described on the page about interior wood finishes. A carved panel from a craftsperson is checked with a moisture meter before installation, just like the boards: carving that goes onto the wall damp cracks along the pattern.

Wool needs air by the sea. We hang rugs and felt on internal walls, not on external ones, where condensation forms in winter. A flatweave rug is thinner than a pile rug and dries faster, so it is easier to look after in an apartment that stays shut in winter. Once a season, woollen pieces are taken down and aired. If you are away from Batumi in winter, damp in the closed apartment is monitored as part of our home watch service, and the rug on the wall goes into the photo report from each visit.

Georgia is seismically active, so we fix heavy ceramics, plates on the wall and stone cladding mechanically, not just with adhesive or a nail. In a rental apartment a shelf of ceramics gets a lip or a holder for each piece.

Stone and wood

For a stone wall you can use tuff, a light, porous volcanic stone. It is quarried in Georgia, for example around Bolnisi, and cut into slabs of the required size, and we check the production time and delivery to Batumi with the supplier before the layout is approved. Tuff absorbs water, so in an apartment it goes on dry walls in the living room, hallway or dining room and is given a water-repellent sealer. We don't use it in the shower or on the splashback by the sink. The substrate and adhesive for heavy slabs are chosen in the same way as for natural stone in interiors.

Wood in this interior is warm and calm: a board-clad wall or headboard, shelves, a solid wood dining table. Hand carving is kept to one piece, such as a door, a panel or a chest in the hallway. CNC-milled carving made to a sketch costs less and is more practical in a rental apartment: if the panel gets damaged, it can be made again from the same file.

Ceramics, rugs, felt and metal

Glaze seals the clay off from water, so glazed ceramics can go in the kitchen and even in the bathroom, while unglazed jugs and bowls are kept in dry rooms. Large plates are hung on the wall on hidden holders, and sometimes a whole set of tableware by one maker goes on display in a lit niche.

In Georgia rugs were woven in Tusheti, Kakheti, Kartli and Pshav-Khevsureti, while pile rugs were made mostly in the Marneuli and Akhaltsikhe areas. Flatweave rugs are more widespread here than pile ones. Felt is linked above all with Tusheti: Tushetian workshops operate in the Alvani villages of Kakheti, and besides rugs they make felt wall panels. We lay a wool rug on the floor in the living room or bedroom, but not in the hallway, where sand comes in from the beach.

Copper and brass in chased metalwork darken in patches in salty air, so for a wall by a window we choose chased pieces under a protective lacquer and keep enamel in a niche or a display cabinet. Motifs for fabrics can be borrowed from lurji supra, the blue printed tablecloths that Tbilisi workshops are printing again today: their plant patterns and animal figures look good on cushions and curtains.

Lighting craftspeople's work

Local pieces only hold the interior together if they can be seen in the evening. A rug or felt on the wall is lit from above by a linear light along the wall, which brings out the texture of the wool. Chased metal is lit from the side: side light shows the relief, while direct light from above flattens it. Glaze catches glare under a spotlight, so ceramics in a niche get diffused light from above or from the side. We add these circuits to the lighting plan together with the other scenes; there is more on that on the page about lighting design.

How not to turn the apartment into an ethnographic museum

Georgian pieces sit best on contemporary style, minimalism and Japandi: on a calm base, ceramics and wool read as accents. A museum is what you get when there are too many things or they are chosen like souvenirs:

• a drinking horn, a dagger, a papakha (a tall sheepskin hat) and a chased feast scene on one wall;
• all the local pieces in one room and nothing in the others;
• dark carving, dark stone and a red rug in a room with a 2.7 m ceiling;
• a clay wine jar in the corner of the living room as the centrepiece;
• a row of identical souvenir plates instead of one piece by a craftsperson;
• a "handmade" rug bought without asking where it was made and from what.

If you are abroad

Craftspeople's pieces can be chosen from a distance. We send photos and videos of their work in daylight, next to the wall and floor samples from the design, along with the dimensions of each piece. You approve the sketch of a commissioned piece on a sheet in the shared folder, and we accept the finished piece by its dimensions and photos and bring it to the site for installation. The rest of how we work at a distance is described on the page about the remote design project.

How much a Georgian style interior costs in Batumi

A contemporary Georgian style design project costs 145 to 190 ₾ per m² of the apartment. This is the designer's work: the layout, 3D visualisation, working drawings and the places for local craftspeople's pieces, that is, wall elevations with dimensions, fixings and lighting. Stone and wood finishes are priced separately, including labour and materials. Turnkey wall cladding in decorative stone or brick costs from 155 to 215 ₾ per m², timber wall cladding from 215 to 310 ₾ per m², and decorative ceiling beams, installed, from 155 to 240 ₾ per linear metre. A tuff wall is priced once the quarry and the slab have been chosen, because the price includes delivery to Batumi.

Craftspeople's pieces are bought at their prices and are not included in the cost of the design. The design costs more when it includes a stone wall with mechanical fixing, timber cladding and several pieces commissioned to sketches. It comes out cheaper if you bring your own pieces and CNC-milled carving replaces hand carving. The final cost is set after the measured survey and once the scope of the design is agreed.