Hasta La Ideas

This renovated apartment in Berlin features raw concrete ceilings and floors that combine oak parquet with decorative tiles (+ slideshow).

Local architects Marc Benjamin Drewes and Thomas Schneider teamed up to design the apartment for a couple and their children, creating two bedrooms, a bathroom and an open-plan living room and kitchen.

The project is named Box 117 and the architects refer to the two white-painted bedrooms and bathroom as “simple boxes” with a narrow shadow gap around the tops of the walls to highlight the edges.

The wooden parquet flooring runs down one side of the apartment beneath white-washed timber ceilings. The red and white cement tiles are positioned on the opposite side underneath the exposed concrete ceilings.

“The raw concrete ceilings are preserving the industrial character,” says Drewes. “Partly old with a wooden pattern, partly new with a smooth surface, the ceiling tells something about the history of the space.”

Each room has a floor-to-ceiling height of 3.4 metres, allowing for overhead storage and an elevated sleeping area in the children’s bedroom.

See more apartments on Dezeen, including one in Barcelona with tiled floors that reveal its historic layout and one in Paris with decorative wooden flooring.

Photography is by Christoph Rokitta.

Here’s a project description from Marc Benjamin Drewes:

Box 117

A couple with two little kids moved into this loft in a Berlin backyard.

A continuous space for a kitchen, living area and sleeping area for the parents surrounds two boxes in which you find the children’s room and the bathroom. This open layout creates the loft character of the space.

The children are sleeping in a niche above a litte storage next to the children’s room. That way one takes advantage of the clear height of 3.4m to create more living area. The sleeping area of the parents can be closed with a room-high sliding door. If the door is open it disappears behind the bathroom-box.

The oak parquet and the cement tiles on the floor are creating a basis full of character for the simple boxes with a limewash coat. A shadow gap all around separates these boxes from the existing elements of the space and all doors are flush with the wall to accentuate the simple form. The raw concrete ceilings are preserving the industrial character. Partly old with a wooden pattern, partly new with a smooth surface the ceiling tells something about the history of the space.

The post Box 117 by Marc Benjamin Drewes
and Thomas Schneider appeared first on Dezeen.