Design Office: Iryna Dzhemesiuk & Vitaly Yurov
Location: Kiev, Ukraine
Month: January 2016
Clareville House | Corben Architects
Apartment Angelina | RSRG Arquitetos
Description by RSRG Arquitetos:
Apt. Angelina’s renovation came up from the owners will, a couple attending their second child, to give a modern touch and expand functional area. The main rooms to be modified were kitchen, bathrooms and bedrooms, which needed an urgent enlargement and the adding of individual bathrooms. Other details make the project go beyond functional: the wall that divides kitchen and living was extended so it could support the vast painting collection, and its apparent brick tiles in addition to the ample copper luminary that goes from side to side of the wall, makes the whole composition look like an art gallery. The kitchen is entirely made of industrial materials, like copper for the kitchen’s lights and coif, and iron for the door. Those materials in company with the burnt cement floor bring elegance and harmony between design and functional concept. The couple’s room was remodeled in order to fit 2 of the remaining rooms. As a result, a large closet and bathroom were added to it. The large circulation area was rearranged into an office and TV room, where the yellow furniture, made of Laka, brings light to the ambient with no windows. On the opposite side, a sliding door leads to the children’s rooms and their individual colored bathrooms.
Design Office: RSRG Arquitetos
Location: Sao Paulo, Brazil
Photographs: Fran Parente
Apartment in Rome | Quincoces Dragò & Partners
House in Australia | Robson Rak Architects
Description by Robson Rak Architects:
This tired Victorian residence was given a complete re-design with new addition completing the vision. Although the house uses fully automated technology, it’s disguised by a warm, textural palette. A timber ribbon of floor and wall travels through the house creating a harmonious, seamless transition from old to new.
The clients’ initial brief was for a scheme which would see new rear living spaces opening to the outside. Another requirement was to have these new spaces fuse seamlessly with the re-modelled old part of the house.
We demolished the original 80’s addition previously elevated 1 metre above the back yard. We relocated this change of level to the end of the hallway and carried the original ceiling height through to a new addition with a generous ceiling height of 3.8 metres. This addition consisted of living space, kitchen, pantry, and laundry.
A new bespoke brick fireplace; designed to be viewed as you enter the original residence, acts as the central axis for the new areas and links back to the bricks in the existing heritage façade.
The kitchen area has full-height bi-fold doors allowing for complete integration to outside. A living area with banquette seating has large sliding windows allowing the outside in. We explored materiality and light to fuse the old with new and to define spaces within the new.
The flooring has been replaced in the original residence with a dark oak which then wraps up onto three walls of the new addition, acting like a ribbon and also creating joinery. This allows for a seamless integration between old and new. A large skylight allows light to beam down upon this transitional space.
Spaces within the new extension are defined by materiality. The kitchen area achieves its own identity with the use of light oak joinery and pale reconstituted stone for benchtop. A concrete floor helps define the new extension but also allows the dark oak, light oak and brown brick fireplace to co-exist within the same space. The brown brick fireplace is a constant reference and reminder of the brick façade of the Victorian house.
Within this warm and textured palette hides a house which is fully automated and technologically advanced.
This tired Victorian has been restored and revived to meet the challenge of another hundred years of relevance. The house is fully automated and future proofed with cutting edge technology. This clever automation is disguised within the organic palette of materials, with no technology is on show. This achieved a seamless integration between old and new interior architecture. To achieve an honest and authentic palate that has longevity, the majority of the joinery is constructed from engineered timber floorboards. Sustainably, double glazed doors/windows were used in the new addition ensuring a consistent temperature is naturally maintained.
Design Office: Robson Rak Architects
Location: Malvern, Australia
Photographs: Lisa Cohen + Mark Roper
Residence in Taiwan | KC Design Studio
Design Office: KC Design Studio
Location: Taipei, Taiwan
Apartment in Sofia | Fimera Design Studio
Elizabeth II | Bates Masi Architects
Description by Bates Masi Architects:
Too often, architecture fixates on the visual sense, with little regard for other faculties of perception. The location of this house, in the heart of a bustling resort town, demanded special consideration of the acoustic sense. Research in architectural acoustics drove the form, materials, and detail of the house, not only shielding the property from the sound of the village, but also manipulating interior details to create a unique acoustic character for the house, one that will instill lasting memories for the family and their guests.
The house is comprised of a series of parallel walls that provide layers of privacy and insulation from the sound of the village. The walls project beyond the living spaces and ascend in height, building from a human-scale wall at the entry to a high wall along the center of the house. The walls diffract the sound waves moving past them, casting an acoustic shadow over the property to create a quiet outdoor gathering area.
The walls are built with insulated concrete forms: a wall assembly nearly twenty inches thick, comprised of a poured concrete core, continuous from footing to roof, wrapped in insulating foam, that also serves as formwork during construction. These walls provide excellent thermal insulation and an extremely low sound transmission coefficient. Due to the strength of their concrete cores, the walls act as structural beams, enabling them to span over the gathering space at the center of the house and the covered deck.
The custom stainless steel clips that attach the wide cedar board siding to the walls were designed to prolong the life of the siding. Traditional wood siding eventually fails because the natural expansion and contraction of the wood is constricted by the screws or nails that rigidly fasten it in place, slowly pulling out the fasteners or splitting the wood. The spring-like clips, however, hold the boards in tension against the house while allowing freedom for the natural movement of the wood.
Inside, variations on the clips are utilized as robe hooks, cabinet pulls, and hinges for an adjustable sound baffle in the central gathering space. The hinges hang cedar boards in front of a felt panel with spaces between them. Sound waves pass through the gaps between the boards, are trapped behind them, and absorbed by the felt. The hinges allow the spacing of the boards to be adjusted so the room can be acoustically tuned for intimate gatherings or boisterous parties. The stair is also tuned to create a subtle acoustic experience. The stair treads taper in thickness, changing the pitch of footfalls as one ascends from the woodshop in the basement, past the main floor with public spaces, guest room, and master bedroom, and up to the childrens’ rooms on the upper floor.
The research of sound and how it affects our perception of space informed the details, materials, and form of the project. This approach to the design led to a richer and more meaningful home for the family.
Design Office: Bates Masi Architects
Location: Amagansett, New York, Usa
Loft in Belgium | Studio Job
Location: Antwerp, Belgium
Photographs: Dennis Brandsma
ZONA Restaurant | POSITION Collective
Description by POSITION Collective:
Designed with POSITION Collective’s functional and minimalist view, ZONA ensures a magical drinking and dining experience, with beautiful features and a soothing ambience, plus some added surprises. This is a truly thoughtful design which simultaneously combines and separates the two functionally different areas – the restaurant and wine bar – by dividing a single space into two clearly distinct areas, both in terms of materials used and atmosphere.
Design Office: POSITION Collective
Location: Budapest, Hungary
Photographs: Gergij Merjas
Trocadero Apartment | Rodolphe Parente
Berlin Apartment | Emmanuel de Bayser
House in Italy | Rocco Valentini Architects
Loft 9b | Dimitar Karanikolov – Veneta Nikolova
Description by Dimitar Karanikolov:
After several years living and working in London architect Dimitar Karanikolov and interior designer Veneta Nikolova moved back to Sofia, where they found a small but interesting attic apartment in a newly built development.They spent the next two years reconstructing the place, designing furniture and experimenting with details, and finishes.
A massive dark “cube” occupies the center of the living room, hiding the bathroom (which sits on the top of the building’s elevator shaft). The “cube” is clad in thin (16mm) custom made concrete panels that continue inside as well.
Since the development was set rather too close to the existing higher residential buildings privacy was a major issue. To solve this the entire apartment has been outlined with tall cantilevered aluminium planters – a green aura that surrounds the entire place and makes the terrace appear like a serene courtyard – completely sheltered from the outer world.
A space full with a lot of а carefully crafted details and surprises:
The wardrobe in the bedroom ( designed to look like an old suitcase ) hides a floor level build-in bathtub situated on a second level of the 4.5m space – an area which is used for a guest bedroom / bathing space.
The techniques used to create the wardrobe inspired the start of a new boutique furniture brand – LOFTCASE ( available soon at http://www.loftcase.com)
Air conditioner is concealed in a bespoke made wooden drawer.
Black metal panels encapsulate the ventilation system. Magnet-held Edison bulbs attached to the them, hang above the dining table.
An interior concept aiming at well-balanced hipster modernity garnished with pieces of vintage furniture and accessories.
Design Office: Dimitar Karanikolov – Veneta Nikolova
Location: Sofia, Bulgaria
Photographs: Minko Minev – Georgi Petev – Dimitar Karanikolov
Casa Lara | Felipe Hess
Charleston House | SLC Interiors
Colorful House | Bradford Shellhammer
Traditional Modern House | Durval Dias
Design Office: Durval Dias
Location: Mallorca, Spain
Traditional Stone House | Philippitzis & Associates
Description by Philippitzis & Associates:
Claims of functionalism, geometrical clarity and simplicity advise the final form, while the organisation of spaces predisposes for a way of life “simple and necessary”, that longs for the contact with the natural environment.
The load bearing concrete structure, of which the construction from pillars on a level with the ground and above, took place by building the stonemasonry, like a “kernel”. This presupposes an in detail design and particular supervision on the electromechanical networks in the stage of manufacture.
Demolition stones, “Syki’s” Pelion stones with river shingles weave the web of stonemasonry which are joint-filled with a special plaster (kourasanit) with the addition of 5 mm tessera.
In the main volume of the building that is totally stone, is organised the space of entry with the living room and the kitchen with the space of food in the depth, as well as a guesthouse. Exempted from internal partitions, in the space of the living room dominates a sense of uplifting under the obvious roof with stone triple gripida. The internal wooden staircase manufactured from trainwood placed in the exterior stone wall leads to the open attic, where is found the bedroom with the bath.
In the smaller volume the little house there is a guesthouse and a laboratory, bath and the essential auxiliary spaces. The roofs were manufactured by local and “Agioritiki” chestnut tree with double insulation and covering with Pelion plates.
Design Office: Philippitzis & Associates
Location: Milies, Pelion, Greece
Homizer 