Pantarei Apartment House

The apartment house at 37 Abrahama Street was designed for the Pantarei company. It is a dense, six-storey building, although the last storey is recessed from the façade.

The building has a light-colored limestone cladding with rows of windows that are divided with black window pillars. These lines are so large that the windows look like ribbon windows.

The entire structure of the apartment house is supported by load-bearing pillars. This solution allowed for a large glazing of the commercial part of the ground floor. The ground floor is also faced with black polished granite slabs. Visually, it separates the light body of the building from the dark ground floor, and such play of colours gives the effect of a "floating" building.

On the ground floor there is an entrance gate leading to the staircase with a lift. The passage entrance hall was limited on both sides with steel bars, currently replaced with bars with geometric decorative motifs, as a part of a project of the Traffic Design Association. In the hallway there is a glazed vestibule with metal black divisions into rectangular fields. The walls in the interior of the staircase were lined with honey-shaded patched marble. The same marble appears on the risers, and on the stairs we see micrite limestone slabs that are brighter and have a more uniform pattern. The interior is very bright, which is further emphasised by the cream and light gray tiles on the floor and landings. The railing has a wooden handrail supported by vertical, metal posts and resembles a tape stretching upwards.

The apartment house created for the Pantarei company was the last project by Zbigniew Kupiec in Gdynia, designed and completed fully before the war.

In 2018, the apartment house gained several new architectural details added as part of the competition for promoting good design practices organised by the Gdynia Design Centre and implemented by the Traffic Design Association. A new signboard was designed and made for the "Desdemona" café, a metal business plate was made for the entrepreneurs operating in the facility and details such as the gate, the gate handle, the lamp with the building number, and the flagstone with the inscription "Pantarei", next to the entrance gate were added. All these elements visually became a part of the historic apartment house, and by imitating the art déco style, they add to its atmosphere, even though they are not original, or historic elements. The new projects were completed by S.C. Szyman and Maciej Połczyński, under the supervision of Jacek Wielebski.