Roominaroom
The clients for this small residential jewel have an expanding family but fixed walls. Since they couldn’t expand upwards or outwards, we had to build inwards. We designed a room within a room.
The project was generated from simple but severe planometric and sectional constraints, literally growing from its context. Its volume melts unostentatiously into a corner to take up minimum volume, yet its innards array to maximise the sense of interior spaciousness. The geometry was generated from ergonomic packing - enabling people to comfortably stand both beneath its cantilever and inside the elevated room. Like a sculpted ship, the carefully-carved interior packs a series of planes and pockets that combined fastidious functionality - and the pursuit of sensual pleasure. Barely shoulder-width at its exposed elevation, the room offers a rich, sensual, multi-programmed journey from door to bed.
The independent structure’s thin CNC-cut plywood ribs (needed since neither wall nor ceiling could offer structural support) swell and retract to provide integrated furniture and shelving, their outer skin sheathed in glowing plasterboard that blends back into the existing room, and frames a panoramic window of acoustic glass. The room is accessed by a spiralling set of stairs that grow from the corner of the room and flow between the pillars of the entry portal, their lower levels continuing as a series of alcove shelves beneath. The entry section neatly bifurcates an existing window frame to enable fire egress beyond it, while inside, the bed cantilevers over the floor to offer sufficient legroom for its future transformation into an extension of the generous desk as the children grow and migrate, and the room becomes a workspace.
The room arrived flat-packed in the back of a truck, and was rapidly unfolded into a set of ribs that were connected and erected within a day.
Photo credit: Alex Haw