House SNB is a renovation of a period villa on the edge of a forest in Wiesbaden, handled by Constanze Ladner as an exercise in working with existing material rather than replacing it. The villa's original fabric, stucco ceilings that shift in density from room to room, herringbone parquet in the connecting spaces, wider wooden boards in the peripheral rooms, and dark timber door and window frames throughout, provides the project's organizational logic. Ladner reads and follows these hierarchies rather than overwriting them.

The stucco ceilings do significant work in establishing the character of individual rooms. Some are restrained, others densely floral, and Ladner calibrates the intervention in each room to follow the ornamental register of the ceiling above it. The herringbone parquet and wider-plank flooring are preserved as a material hierarchy that reinforces the enfilade sequence of the apartment. The dark frames act as visual anchors that ground the lighter elements layered around them.

The kitchen is the project's most inventive move. Rather than removing an existing IKEA system, Ladner reinterpreted it: butter-yellow fronts and a coordinating worktop replace the originals, upper cabinets are stacked into a full pantry configuration, and the whole assembly is framed by gold-toned acrylic mirror. The mirror does 2 things at once. It reflects light back into what is a deep room, and it lends the utilitarian cabinet carcasses a material richness they were not designed to carry. The result sits closer to bespoke joinery than flat-pack, without replacing a single structural element.