Hasta La Ideas

If you’ve ever been given the fantastic opportunity to mind a newborn baby, then you’ll also be aware that it’s a handful trying to make sure they’re safe, they sleep well and that they are never alone for too long. It can be as demanding as it is rewarding, and both Max Mysechko and Artemiy Drobyazko understood this when trying to buy a gift for their colleagues’ recent newborn. Searching the web for hours, these guys found no luck of a playful baby monitor appropriate for the purchase, so in-turn decided to design one themselves – which is where the Strixie was born.

Equipped with a video streaming camera, microphone, speaker, built-in battery, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity, the Strixie has what it takes to shrink you down to size and put you right there beside your baby. Strixie has some nifty tricks; it can play music directly from your smartphone, remind you to check in on your child, alerts you to excessive noise in the room like crying, allow two-way audio conversations and even enables the user to receive live feeds of the baby too. With design similarities to Vivien Muller’s Ulo, the Strixie carries some of the goals and visions from the Ulo with the specific use of newborn connection and safety.

That being said, there are things about Strixie that I’m not sold on, such as the ballast used to keep the device upright. Adding weight into a device that will be close to a baby seems dangerous and can be easily avoided by a broad base that tapers upwards. Also, having the camera so low on the body of the device is bound to be covered by cloth if it’s near the baby or bound to have the view obscured if it is sitting on top of a shelf/desk. This concept has a nice idea behind it, however, I feel some areas require careful and strenuous thought.

Designers: Max Mysechko & Artemiy Drobyazko for Qvarta

Dans le dernier clip tiré de leur second album « Ash », les deux soeurs d’Ibeyi signées chez XL Recordings et adoubées entre autre par Beyoncé et Prince, se trouvent plongées dans un jeu de miroirs fragmentés, surréaliste et onirique. À travers un parallélisme graphique où deux dominantes de couleurs se répondent et s’embrassent, la déclaration d’amour et de fraternité écrite par Lisa Kaindé à sa soeur Naomi prend alors un sens tout particulier. D’un rouge acide et fougueux, on passe en un instant à une douceur immaculée, illustrant les deux personnalités aux antipodes que forme le duo de jumelles Franco-Cubaine. « I wanna be like you » est un voyage visuel signé par le réalisateur parisien Remi Besse.

It’s a tale of two cities: The Glad House, the silk pajama-makers based in LA, stocked at the one-floor Austin Motel. The blood red fingernails on this silk eye mask match the red-orange vinyl cushion bed-frames and lip-shaped bedside phones—and signal……

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The founder of MW Architects used black-blue engineering bricks to add an extension of just seven square metres to his renovated London home.

Matt Wood‘s narrow Victorian house had an area of just 19 square metres when he bought it. Small but significant, his extension takes the total size up to 26 square metres.

Previously, the central hall of the house has been used as a dining room. However, as the main circulation point that links the front and back of the building as well as the main staircase, it felt cramped and claustrophobic.

The idea of extending into the side return was constrained by the position of the house, which tightly abuts the neighbour’s property and already receives limited light, as the back of the house faces north.

Instead, the kitchen-dining extension was relocated to the very back of the house, leading off the galley kitchen and creating a clear sightline from the hall through to the garden.

The design maximises the feeling of space, with a frameless, glass-cornered window, and a thin, “visually light” steel-latticed roof. The smooth-fronted plywood and laminate kitchen units were custom made to fit and maximise the narrow space.

“The size of the extension meant we had to be really precise and rigorous,” Wood told Dezeen.

“It’s all based around the 120-centimetre dining table, bringing all the dimensions to an absolute minimum, with no wasted space. We had a budget, and you pay per square metre for most materials, so by going for the minimum amount of space, we were able to spend more on finishes.”

To contrast with the yellow brick of the original house, the extension is made from dark Staffordshire blue engineering bricks, which are more commonly used for damp proofing below ground.

“Using dark engineering bricks in a domestic environment is quite a hard sell, but I think it’s an interesting idea,” said Wood, who founded his firm MW Architects in 2009. “It was really important that [the work] was executed well, as it becomes a tangible surface, so the pointing was very important.”

The exterior walls of the extension are enlivened by the occasional brick positioned at right angles to jut out from the wall. The motif serves a function on the side elevation, where a thick copper rain chain has been used in place of a water pipe.

“You see copper rain chains in Japan quite often,” explained Wood.

“They stop water getting blow away as it comes off the roof, and the sticking-out bricks placed around it help to contain the splash. It’s just quite playful, so we repeated it in other areas, and inside we rested the steel-plate shelves on jutting bricks as well.”

The mix of light and dark materials, as well as the use of colour, have been carefully balanced throughout the house to offset the discrepancies in available light.

The south-facing front room has been painted a deep blue, as has the stairway, and there are accents of blue throughout the ground floor, while the inner hall and galley kitchen have been painted white to reflect the natural light.

By having a dark wall at the end of the space, it makes it harder to perceive the depth, creating a greater feeling of space.

The indoor floor is covered in a pale herringbone parquet, and the pattern is continued outside on the patio in dark herringbone brickwork.

“We were trying to compensate for the light differences with the material choices and to play with the variations of light,” said Wood. “If you use light materials outside, they can be blindingly bright when they catch the sun, and the inside then feels noticeably darker.”

Photography by French + Tye

The post Matthew Wood adds seven-square-metre extension to his small London home appeared first on Dezeen.

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