The house of a YouTuber in Moscow

This lovely story of professional love began when the Moscow YouTuber Viktor Viden decided to start his YouTube channel, called Room Tourist.

"Room Tourist" is a hit channel devoted to interior design. Viktor travels all across Russia, visiting spectacular homes of singular beauty, or ones with a story worth telling. His dream was to visit many houses to gather ideas, and with the best of everything he had seen in each one, to build his own home.

Surprisingly, Viktor had decided to explore a foreign country to film new episodes. For reasons we don't know, he chose Spain — and more specifically, decided to come to Barcelona.

Meanwhile, in Barcelona, there was us — RITUAL, an interior design firm.

We were working as usual when suddenly the phone rang; someone from the "Room Tourist" production team called to propose filming an episode in the homes of some of our clients. We felt honoured and accepted. After the shoot in Barcelona, Viktor, to our surprise, proposed that we design his new house in Moscow.

It was a unique chance to begin international projects and expand RITUAL abroad, so the deal was closed quickly. Designing an interior for an influencer who will constantly be showing his home — and receiving opinions about it — is a great challenge.

And the project took off

The first and most important thing as interior designers is to get to know our clients as quickly as possible, along with their daily rituals: their tastes, their professions, and what their everyday and home life is like.

We soon discovered that Viktor owns a wallpaper factory called Wallstreet Studio. This became a turning point: to conceive a home as beautiful and striking as possible, while helping Wallstreet Studio develop new products. In short, our ultimate goal was to take his products to a whole new conception.

We were determined to bring in many different decorative finishes, as if we were in a great experimental laboratory, offering large-format prints across many materials: tiles, wallpaper, glass, even rugs. That's why we had high hopes that this project would be beautiful, artistic and, above all, tell a story behind the visual concept.

The second pillar was to bring in novel materials of Mediterranean essence: clay walls, glazed ceramic latticework, and Italian and Spanish ceramics.

The third commandment of the project was to capture Viktor's eclecticism: an optimistic, colourful, chameleonic, spontaneous character, capable of the most incredible transformations. A space both sophisticated and easygoing, full of daring and expression. The project had to move you through creativity and surprise, with the deep idea that this is Viktor's home: it will happen this way once, and never again.

The fourth and final commandment was the lighting design, created in great detail. Intimate, warm atmospheres, with some areas of minimal light and chiaroscuro, heighten the emotion and invite contemplation of the various materials and finishes used throughout the work.