World Spa East
A tactile house of eclectic collages
This five bedroom apartment forms a home for a wonderful family of four- a Supreme Court lawyer and his wife, also a trained lawyer along with teenage sons. The family loves to travel around the world and bring back numerous curios, artefacts & souvenirs. Their love for books & art has resulted in a vast & growing collection of paintings and thousands of books. Apart from this they had an eclectic mix of interesting furniture accumulated over the years which they wanted upscaled and reused barring a few new pieces.
These myriad objects, each with its own story to tell, then set the context for the design process. We realised that the design had to be very basic & minimal, almost in the background and not competing with the objects. At the same time the design had to curate the objects/paintings/furniture in a way that they find their proper place such that it doesn’t feel like clutter but part of a larger whole. We decided that this eclectic, maximalist collage of things could be set against an underlying unifying background of minimalist & raw materials. Exposed brick tiles, whitewashed bricks, metal & wood veneered surfaces form the basic material pallet. This tension between the industrial & the eclectic was very interesting to us.
^ photographs: Studio Noughts & Crossses
Open shelves in metal & veneer finished plywood are designed to house books, curios and artefacts. These form a significant design element which are repeated across the home acting as screens or organising movement as required.
Exposed brick tiles laid in herring bone pattern on carefully chosen surfaces lend texture to the space while all the walls that are newly constructed due to some modification in layout are finished directly in paint without plaster. A system of mdf channels carries the lighting & conduits, avoiding false ceiling over the already very low height existing ceiling.
malkum