UrbanNest Décor

The apartment is one room, fourteen feet tall, with a single north-facing window wall and a concrete floor. The client had moved from a three-bedroom house and wanted the move to be a genuine reduction rather than a storage problem relocated.

The constraint we set

Eleven pieces of furniture, total, including the bed. Everything else had to be built in, and anything built in had to serve at least two functions. It is a severe rule and it did most of the design work for us.

• A plywood volume containing the bed, with storage in its base and a desk on its far face
• A four-foot bench at the window that is seating, a radiator cover and a shoe cupboard
• One dining table, round, which is also the desk when the desk is not enough
• A single tall cabinet holding everything a kitchen cannot
• Seven loose pieces: two chairs, a sofa, two lamps, a stool and a mirror

Working with the height

Fourteen feet of ceiling is a gift and a trap. Filling it makes the room feel like a warehouse with furniture in it. We kept everything below eight feet except the sleeping volume, which rises to nine and a half, and left the upper third of the room entirely empty.

Walls are a warm off-white with a faint pink undertone, chosen because north light turns a neutral white flatly gray by two in the afternoon. We tested five whites over ten days before finding one that held.

Editing is the whole design. Anything I add now has to displace something, and that rule is a great deal more useful than a bigger apartment.

Outcome

The client has added two objects in eighteen months: a rug and a second lamp. The plywood volume has been repainted once, which was always the intention and takes an afternoon.

Eight weeks from brief to installation, with the joinery built off site in three sections and assembled in a single day.

Costs

The joinery was three quarters of the budget and the loose furniture was the rest, which is the inverse of a typical residential split. In a single-room apartment that ratio is correct: the built elements are doing the work of walls, storage and half the furniture at once.