A quick 3-month long project, we were commissioned to do the interior renovation of this apartment after the client fired his prior architects and construction was about to begin. Inside a stoic modernist building in the center of the city, the 90-square-meter duplex was in bad shape. Because of the time constraint and small budget we decided the intervention had to be mostly about removing instead of adding: we cleared most of the first floor of any wall divisions and made living, kitchen and dining one space, concentrating the storage and bathroom into a wooden cube at one of the corners of the plan. This allowed us to expand the terrace inside in line with the new kitchen counter. Years of paint and plaster were scraped to expose both the original concrete ceilings and the steel and wood staircase. A warm Brazilian wood engineering floor was selected for the upper level, where the 2 bedrooms are housed. Matte white microcement flooring was used for the access level. Finally, aluminum hidden-frame windows facing inward were fitted on the whole apartment, and we painted the whole thing white.