A LAROGY apartment does not come together in a furniture shop. It comes together in auction rooms, in restorers' workshops, in storerooms beneath Viennese courtyards. Every piece has a story and that is precisely the point.
Those who enter one of our apartments for the first time often say the same thing. "This doesn't feel like a rental flat." That is no accident. We do not build apartments. We assemble rooms in which someone has already lived, before us. And in which someone will live again after us.
Vintage interior for us does not mean. One mid-century armchair per apartment as a statement. It means. Every piece is found, often restored, sometimes reupholstered, always decided upon individually. There is nothing here that stands in ten other apartments. There is also nothing that did not exist two years ago.
Where the pieces come from
We buy in Vienna. This is a city where you can still get lucky. At the Dorotheum, at smaller auction houses on the Westbahnstraße, at flea markets on the Naschmarkt, at antique shops in the Josefstadt. Sometimes at a clearance sale from an old apartment in the Leopoldstadt whose last resident has just moved into a care home.
This is not a design concept; it is a practice. We go looking once a week. We know which dealer has what right now. We know three restorers who weave new seat surfaces for us, replace veneers, polish brass fittings. One of them has worked in a workshop in Brigittenau for thirty years, and she is the reason our sofas outlast many tenancies.
We also buy in France a few times a year. Brocantes in Normandy, Marché Paul Bert in Paris. But most things stay local, because it makes sense, because the distances are short, and because a Viennese writing desk from 1910 simply sits better in a Viennese period building than anywhere else.
Patina is not a defect
We sometimes receive calls from guests who have discovered a small mark on a table edge. We explain what patina is. And we explain why we keep it.
A table that is 80 years old has traces. A mirror that has seen three bedrooms has a small spot in the silver. A parquet floor from 1898 has a place where the piano leg stood. We do not smooth that away. We polish it, we care for it, we let it live.
An apartment without patina is an apartment without a past. And someone who stays for just a month does not want to invent a past, they want to feel connected.
That is also a stance against the throwaway logic of the furniture chains. We buy nothing we will dispose of in five years. We buy pieces that have already survived a hundred years and are therefore well enough made to survive another hundred.
Materials we actually use
Four materials carry our rooms. Wood, lime plaster, linen, brass. Everything else arranges itself around them.
Wood. Oak for the parquet, walnut for wardrobes, cherry for chairs. Solid pieces, often with visible grain. Oiled or waxed finish, never sealed, never high-gloss. Wood is allowed to smell, to change colour, to react to a cup that was set down too hot.
Lime plaster. Instead of white emulsion paint, we use mineral plasters and lime washes on most walls. They absorb humidity, they breathe, they have a depth that no paint from a tin can achieve. In the Volkertplatz apartments you can see this particularly well in the ochre walls of the Salon Studio.
Linen. Curtains, bedspreads, cushions. Belgian linen, unbleached or in muted tones. It creases. It must crease. An ironed curtain looks like it came from a hotel catalogue. A slightly crumpled curtain looks like a Sunday morning.
Brass. Door handles, lamp fittings, coat hooks. Unlacquered, so it can age. After two years it is no longer golden but bronze-coloured. That is intentional.
Why this matters for 30+ days
Someone who spends a night in a hotel can live with any interior. Someone who lives in an apartment for two months notices every detail. A lamp that gives too cold a light becomes an irritant. A chair that does not suit the table becomes an annoyance. A bed that creaks becomes a sleep problem.
That is precisely why we go to this effort. We know that our guests live in the rooms, not just sleep in them. They cook, they work, they have guests over, they argue, they make up. They need rooms that can bear all of that and ideally. Rooms that make it more beautiful.
For your own spaces. Maison LAROGY
From this practice, a new offer emerged in spring 2026. Maison LAROGY, our interior service for private clients. Anyone who has their own apartment in Vienna, bought, inherited, freshly in need of renovation and would like to furnish it in our handwriting can engage us.
We do it in the same way as for our own houses. We search, we restore, we assemble. No styles from a catalogue, no generic packages. More on the Maison page.
What we never buy
There is a short list of things that do not appear in a LAROGY apartment. Sofas made from foam with polyester upholstery. Coffee tables from MDF with foil coating. Pendant lights from the big DIY store. Art prints of famous paintings in thin aluminium frames. Artificial plants. Microfibre bed linen. Glass carafes with logos.
That is not snobbery. That is experience. These things last two years. They age badly. They feel wrong once you have used them for longer than three days. And they make a room interchangeable, which is the exact opposite of what we want.
Our ambition is simple. Every apartment should feel as though it lived before us. And guests who pass through it should be ones who do not forget it.