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The brief posed by the client was for the renovation of a third-floor apartment within a Grade II listed Victorian building, and its transformation into a high-end four bedroom home in London.

The restoration and re-application of traditional decorative elements such as cornices, mantel pieces and skirting was necessary to respect the historic context of the building. At the same time, the introduction of a contemporary SUPER-FURNITURE component complements, as well as breaks away from, the very same historical background.

The intervention is openly distinctive from the sombre nature of apartment’s Victorian tradition. Superficially attaching itself to the interior, the SUPER-FURNITURE houses the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, suggesting an almost temporary installation of the spaces it creates and the objects it contains. These constant dialogues between old and new are the key principles in the overall design.

The form of the SUPER-FURNITURE drew on the forces of the existing interior and space, all the while looking to break the ‘formal-architectural language’. In everyday life, a given form allows us to set up connections between the objects and the language with which we communicate. The SUPER-FURITURE breaks such connections. Here, a kitchen does not have to look like a kitchen, it allows users entering the space to reconfigure the perception of a kitchen and create new connections, discovering new meaning and perhaps unimagined spaces.

We presented a film at the Venice Biennale 2014, ‘64 Stanhope Gardens’, which you can see here.

Awards

• Simon Prize for Architecture, Mies Van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona, Private Space category, shortlisted (2016)
• INSIDE: World Architecture Festival, Singapore, Residential category, shortlisted (2014)

Photography
Sakiko Kohashi