In Uus-Veerenni, central Tallinn's largest new residential quarter, Tiiu 14 and Tiiu 16 share one architectural idea across two neighbouring addresses. Tiiu 14 is the first to take shape: two above-ground volumes, 14-1 and 14-2, sharing a single underground car park, right next door to Tiiu 16, which continues the same design language. The idea began with a wish for variety — not one repeating courtyard, but several, each with its own identity. Where the site's detailed plan called for corner-joined volumes along Tiiu Street, KOKO separated them instead into slender, tower-like forms. The street front reads as more open and porous as a result, letting morning sun reach all the way into the courtyards behind. Tiiu 14-1 rises in sections of eight and five storeys; Tiiu 14-2 in three volumes of four, eight and ten. The guiding word behind every facade is articulation: because floor plans largely repeat, each building reads as if assembled from individual cubes stacked loosely together, with cladding and window geometry varying unit by unit to avoid monotony. Light concrete meets brick tile in warm reddish and green tones alongside glass — a palette that echoes the wider quarter's own play of muted brick and concrete, so the buildings sit comfortably among their already-built neighbours.
Inside, the apartments follow the same instinct toward variety within repetition. Homes range from compact two-room flats to spacious five-room family apartments, roughly 35 to 128 square metres, with layouts that repeat cleanly from floor to floor for efficiency while the facade around them keeps shifting unit by unit. Nearly every home opens onto a glazed balcony, its upper panels openable for fresh air even in cooler weather; ground-floor apartments trade balconies for private terraces above the underground garage roof, without losing their connection to planted ground. The uppermost apartments, tucked under the highest volumes, are built on a raised-floor system — a quiet piece of engineering allowing step-free access onto roof terraces and giving plumbing more freedom to route beneath the floor. Every apartment meets insolation requirements and none faces north alone; from the upper floors of the tallest volumes, the view stretches out toward Tallinn's Old Town. Windows run floor-to-ceiling throughout, with balconies stepping slightly outward from the facade line to reinforce the massing's vertical rhythm. Entrances step back from the facade, gaining a quiet emphasis of their own. Staircases sit at each building's perimeter rather than buried in its core, so daylight reaches shared lobbies as generously as it does the apartments themselves.
The same idea that shapes the facades outside carries indoors, too. Where the exterior speaks in articulated volumes, the shared interiors pick up the same language in colour and material: Tiiu 14-1's common areas echo the playful contrast of its red brick and concrete facade, while Tiiu 14-2's lobbies and corridors take their tone from the building's own green brick and concrete pairing outside. Warmth and elegance come from metal accents, timber surfaces and custom-designed furniture, softening what could otherwise read as purely structural space. Lighting follows a single logic throughout: warm-toned LED fixtures at 3000K with high colour rendering, recessed into suspended ceilings in the apartments and matched by the same language in the shared areas. In the stairwells, a perforated plasterboard ceiling quietly improves the acoustics of what would otherwise be hard, reverberant space. Apartment entrance doors were designed as custom pieces rather than off-the-shelf products, matched to each building's fire and sound-insulation requirements; doors between rooms inside are veneered timber, and in several apartments the sauna's front wall is glazed rather than solid, letting borrowed light reach a room that would otherwise sit windowless at the heart of the plan. Underlying all of it is a single brief: contemporary homes built on sustainable environmental design principles, with a feel that is at once striking and distinctive, yet unmistakably warm and inviting. Outdoors, two connected, car-free courtyards each carry their own character, joined by paths that let residents move freely between them. The northern one sits entirely above the parking garage; its ramp roof carries a green roof of sedum, wild strawberry and low grasses. At its heart, an angular seating area anchors the space, flanked at one end by a green island of small trees and shrubs and, at the other, by a still water feature centred on a sculpture. To the south, a livelier courtyard takes over: a reflective stainless-steel canopy shelters a play area set into soft red-toned ground, ringed by circular green containers holding trees and shrubs. Terraces on both courtyards are separated from the walking paths by hedges and lawn, forming a continuous green buffer for the ground-floor apartments; the hedge planting alternates evergreen shrubs with deciduous, flowering ones, so the boundary changes character through the seasons. At the site's southwest corner, a denser, taller park unfolds, its centre dipping into a shallow hollow that doubles as a rain garden — stormwater from the courtyards is channelled here, into a stone-bedded, planted basin that turns a technical necessity into a landscape feature. Bicycle parking sits near every entrance too, so a visiting friend has somewhere to leave a bike. As evening falls, a soft, consistent lighting scheme settles over both courtyards, carrying the same warm tone used indoors out into the landscape. Beneath it all, 149 parking spaces serve both buildings, reached from Tiiu Street. Most of the structure above ground is precast, with three-layer sandwich concrete panels forming the outer walls. It is, at its heart, one architectural thought carried across two street numbers and every scale in between — from a whole courtyard down to the tone of a stairwell ceiling.