Hasta La Ideas

Reclaimed timber boards and sections of mesh fencing feature in this dimly-lit bar in Sydney by Australian studio Luchetti Krelle (+ slideshow).

Donny’s Bar, located in the northern beachside suburb of Manly, was designed by Sydney studio Luchetti Krelle to resemble a New York loft.

The bar serves a selection of Asian-inspired dishes, so the design team wanted to also incorporate Asian influences into the space to conjure up images of “a back alley in Chinatown”.

“The brief was to create a warm and friendly New York style loft bar which would serve Asian style tapas and dumplings – on a tight budget,” the designers explained. “Avoiding overt Asian theming, we instead opted for a pared-back approach to the design.”

A range of recycled materials were used to transform the stark space into a dark and atmospheric bar with exposed brick walls and concrete flooring throughout.

A polished copper counter forms a centrepiece in the downstairs bar area. Recycled timber boards and paving stones line the base of the counter, with lighting glowing through the spaces in between.

“The rustic quality of the timber contrasts with a shiny copper rectified top and perfectly mitred timber lining boards weaving diagonally across the lower ceiling and walls,” the designers added.

High tables and bar stools are set against the side walls, while worn leather armchairs, low tables and cushioned footstools are arranged next to a spiralling metal staircase.

Dozens of lights encased in small wire cages are suspended from the mesh-covered ceiling of the double-height space, creating a feature above the entrance.

On the mezzanine floor above, exposed brick and wood panels feature on some walls, while another features red Asian-style prints. Fluorescent lighting tubes illuminate the space and are covered by more sections of mesh wire.

Tables and chairs indicate a space for dining and are accompanied with seating booths tucked away in the corners.

Old toilet cisterns were incorporated into the bathroom, while light bulbs are fixed to a network of exposed pipes above the sinks.

Photography is by Michael Wee.

Here’s a project description from Luchetti Krelle:

Donny’s & Co Manly

Conjuring up images of a back alley in Chinatown, Donny’s Bar is an unexpected and refreshing change to the coastal suburb of Manly and the bar scene there. The design resolution captures a careful balancing of the rustic versus the refined – where urban meets with an Asian Australian flavour.

The existing space was a stark white plasterboard box with a commercial look and feel. The brief was to create a warm and friendly New York style loft bar which would serve Asian style tapas and dumplings – on a tight budget. Avoiding overt Asian theming, we instead opted for a paired back approach to the design.

Our client is from rural NSW and we certainly played on his roots with the barn like scale and proportions of the space. The mezzanine is set back from the entry, allowing the volume of the space to be fully appreciated upon entry.

The bar front utilises railway sleepers casually bundled together with those adjustable ratchet straps used to tie down a load on a truck. The rustic quality of the timber contrasts with a shiny copper rectified top and perfectly mitred timber lining boards weaving diagonally across the lower ceiling and walls.

Canvas lorry tarps are casually tied off to walls and chain-link fencing stretches across the upper ceiling, screening the acoustic treatment from the eye. Recycled materials play a big role in the palette – from the brickwork painstakingly clad to the walls to the re-birthed old toilet cisterns.

When budgets are tight we need to work harder to innovate within our means and this project is an excellent example of such. More and more these days, we designers are being held to account for superfluous spending and budget overruns. We worked hard to nut out this concept and edit it back to its bare bones. We have been creative and clever in the use of every day materials like the chain-link fencing to become features and by using recycled timber and brick for the majority of the palette.

This design is sustainable – both in our design approach and its potential for longevity as a thriving small bar in Manly.

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bar based on a New York loft appeared first on Dezeen.

London architect Ben Nightingale has renovated a Victorian property he owns in Hackney, transforming three separate flats into a large family home featuring a double-height library and an attic playroom.

Ben Nightingale, one of the co-founders of Kilburn Nightingale Architects, bought the four-storey house on Greenwood Road to provide a family home for his wife and their three young daughters.

The building had previously been converted into three separate flats, meaning Nightingale had to completely re-plan the layout. This included removing existing walls, creating openings in the floor and rebuilding the original staircase.

“This project shows how a typical Victorian home can be opened up for more flexible use by a family, and also be adapted to positively reduce the carbon footprint,” Nightingale told Dezeen.

“The layout breaks down the traditional horizontal layering of this type of house, and the addition of a number of different types of insulation, photovoltaics and solar thermal panels greatly improve the energy efficiency,” he added.

Like many of London’s townhouses, the building has two storeys accessible from ground level – one that is slightly raised above the street and one that sits in line with a sunken garden. The architect transformed both of these floors into communal family spaces.

The lower ground floor accommodates a large kitchen and dining room that leads straight out to the garden beyond.

The double-height library area is positioned at the back, creating a visual connection with two living rooms on the floor above.

The first of these is a relaxed space facing out over the lawn, while the other is a formal area where the family can entertain guests.

The architect worked with a local joiner to add new sweet-chestnut window frames and cladding to an old extension at the rear of the house, intended to “mask the original poor quality brickwork”.

Five bedrooms and two bathrooms occupy the two upper levels. The attic was also remodelled, creating a playroom for the children that doubles as a guest bedroom.

Photography is by Charles Hosea.

Here’s the project description from Kilburn Nightingale Architects:

71 Greenwood Rd, London E8
Repair/remodelling and refurbishment of an existing house

This project involves the conversion, repair and extensive remodelling of a semi-detached mid Victorian house in Dalston, Hackney.

The house was purchased by Ben and Jane Kilburn at auction as a freehold building containing three flats. Ben Kilburn is a director with Richard Nightingale at Kilburn Nightingale Architects, an architecture practice based near King’s Cross.

This project presented an opportunity for Kilburn Nightingale (with Ben in the role of architect/owner) to develop a design that would take into account the joint requirements of contemporary family living (with three daughters aged 10, 8 and 5) and the rehabilitation and improvement of a house that had been neglected and interfered with by previous owners.

The renovation was designed to provide a functional home taking into account a need for flexible living space that would allow for a number of different activities to take place concurrently (so that the family could be ‘together’). The arrangement also needed to allow more privacy when required. The design also avoids having the lower kitchen/living area separated from the rest of the house by a formal, underused living area at upper ground level.

To achieve this, upper and lower living areas are connected to each other through a new double-height space at the rear of the property, and also connected to the garden through double-height glazing. This sense of openness is enhanced throughout the house by a number of new windows in the flank wall bringing light into the middle of the house.

The lower ground floor of the house has been remodelled to provide kitchen, dining and living area, with the double-height space at the rear of the house opening up to a flowing living space above. This upper living space is loosely divided into a more relaxed area closest to the balcony and views to the garden, and a slightly more formal living room at the front of the house.

First and second floors are divided into bedrooms and new bathrooms, and the attic has been converted to provide a flexible study/sleep-over/play space. Access to the attic is via a ‘hit and miss’ stair that is designed to take up as little space as possible.

The connection of the lower two floors of the house with the garden is made partly through the large windows/doors at the rear of the house, but also through the construction of a new shed/studio at the back of the garden. The large glazed double doors of the shed face back to the big doors in the glazed screen at the back of the house, with the suggestion that the shed is akin to a piece of the house that has floated out into the garden.

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townhouse with sweet-chestnut joinery appeared first on Dezeen.

Milan 2014: Nao Tamura drew on experiences from the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami to create an installation of suspended mobiles, intended to evoke a sense of fragility and harmony with nature.

Japanese designer Nao Tamura told Dezeen that her sculptural work was influenced by the earthquake that struck Japan in 2011.

“We lost a lot of people and I thought life is so fragile, people are so fragile,” said Tamura. “But also because of the tragedy, we learned to accept the nature and live in harmony with it.”

“I wanted to make something very fragile and very delicate, but everything is keeping the balance,” Tamura explained. “It creates this kind of sculptural piece and it’s about light, the piece, the shadow, the air and yourself. When you interact with the piece it creates this motion and the whole thing changes.”

Unique discs of acrylic resin with a coloured coating were fixed to a framework of thin rods representing the interconnected systems existing in nature.

Thin wires attached to the rods and held in tension by transparent plastic discs gave the piece structure and enabled the carefully balanced branches to pivot.

The movement of people in the space caused the delicate structures to move gently, causing a corresponding movement in the overlapping shadows cast on the ground.

“Through this piece, I wanted people to think about what we have now; the air, the sun and the nature and keeping good harmony with the nature and to realise that no matter how small your action is, you will have an effect that is larger than yourself,” Tamura added.

Tamura developed the concept for the Interconnection installation in response to a brief from Lexus that asked designers to explore the theme Amazing in Motion.

Tamura’s multidisciplinary studio has previously worked with designers and brands including Artek, Issey Miyake, Nike and Wonderglass on projects that frequently incorporate motifs and influences from nature.

Interconnection was presented by Lexus during Milan’s design week alongside works developed around the same theme by Italian designer Fabio Novembre and MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group.

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Interconnection by Nao Tamura appeared first on Dezeen.

Milan 2014: a teaspoon that follows a cup around a table and a clock that mimics the actions of the person in front of it were among projects presented by students from Swiss university ECAL in Milan (+ movie).

Based around the title Delirious Home, ECAL‘s Bachelor of Industrial Design and Media & Interaction Design students explored alternatives to the idea of the electronically connected smart home by creating products with more tangible behaviours.

“Technology has become smart but without a sense of humour, let alone quirky unexpected behaviour,” explained the project’s leaders Alain Bellet and Chris Kabel in a statement.

“This lack of humanness became the starting point to imagine a home where reality takes a different turn, where objects behave in an uncanny way,” they added.

The projects employ sensor-based technology to enhance the interaction between user and product, encouraging people to touch them, listen to them, blow on them or move in front of them to see how they react.

Guillaume Markwalder and Aurélia von Allmen’s Broken Mirror features a round surface made from a sheet of wrinkled reflective material that is pulled taught to show a clear reflection when someone approaches it.

Mr Time by Léa Pereyre, Claire Pondard and Tom Zambaz is a clock that shows the correct time until someone stands in front of it, at which point the hands follow the position of the user’s arms.

Bonnie & Clyde by Romain Cazier, Anna Heck and Leon Laskowski produces a playful interaction between a coffee cup and teaspoon.

The cup has a blue interior surface that is tracked by a camera suspended above the table, which sends a signal to a magnet mounted to a mechanism under the table surface. When the cup is moved, the magnet also moves to the same spot and causes the spoon to follow it.

Il Portinaio by Anne-Sophie Bazard, Tristan Caré and Léonard Golay is a curtain of suspended threads that reacts to the presence of someone standing in front of it. A disembodied hand moves along a raised track to their location and draws back a section of the curtain so they can walk through.

Voodoo by Megan Elisabeth Dinius, Timothée Fuchs, Antoine Furstein and Bastien Girschig facilitates a tactile interaction between people sitting in two armchairs by making one of the chairs shudder and vibrate when someone moves in the other one.

Iris Andreadis, Nicolas Nahornyj and Jérôme Rütsche designed a series of containers called Ostinati that can be tipped over and spin on the edges of their bases thanks to embedded gyroscopes.

The Delicious Bells by Caroline Buttet, Louisa Carmona, Margaux De Giovannini and Antonio Quirarte turn dining into an aural experience by projecting noise from speakers embedded in the handles of glass cloches when the cloches are raised.

Touching the shadows of lamp shades projected onto a wall in Léa Pereyre, Claire Pondard and Tom Zambaz’s Chairoscuro installation causes the corresponding light to turn on and off.

Victor Férier, Ludovica Gianoni and Daniele Walker designed a fan attached to a smaller version that users blow on to start the device.

Cactunes by Pierre Charreau, Martin Hertig and Pauline Lemberger invites people to touch a series of cacti that each emit a different sound on contact.

The project was presented at Spazio Orso 16 in Milan’s Brera district during the Salone Internazionale del Mobile last week.

Photography is by Axel Crettenand and Sylvain Aebischer.

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address “lack of humanness” in electronics appeared first on Dezeen.

A clay-based black paint forms a protective layer across the facade of this woodland cabin in Finland, designed by Playa Architects as the second home for a Finnish family living abroad (+ slideshow).

Finnish architect Tuukka Vuori of Playa Architects designed the house for friends who want to spend their holidays in their home country.

Named Villa Kettukallio, the 122-square-metre house is located on the edge of a lake in Hirvensalmi, on a spot where the family used to take forest walks. It will be visited throughout the year, so needed to be accommodating in all seasons.

“Winters can be very cold, sometimes minus 30, then in summer there’s daylight around the clock, so it had to work in both of these circumstances,” Vuori told Dezeen.

“The main brief was to take in these surroundings, so we added big glazed openings facing towards the lakeside,” he added.

Birch clads the exterior and has been coated with a black distemper paint that is typical of Scandinavian dwellings. This will help to protect the building from ageing.

Living and dining rooms take up around half of the house’s floorspace, encouraging the family to spend more time in communal areas rather than in the bedrooms.

A sauna sits on the north side of the site on the opposite side of a veranda, creating a protected seating area where residents can cool down. An entrance then leads directly back into the house via the shower room.

“Traditionally lakeside homes have separate saunas, but the family didn’t want it to be separate,” said Vuori. “This meant we could avoid building extra shower spaces, which also deals with some environmental concerns.”

A second terrace on the south side of the building gives the family a sunny space for dining outdoors.

Walls and ceilings inside the house are lined with birch and alder. The floors are pine and feature stripes created by the family’s own sawmill.

“With pine you usually get this really strong texture in the wood, these horizontal sections,” explained Vuori.

Heating is provided by a wood-burning stove that sits between the kitchen and the living room. Constructed from brick, this is coated with grey plaster to give it the appearance of polished concrete.

Photography is by Tuomas Uusheimo.

Here’s more information from Playa Architects:

Villa Kettukallio

The villa is the all-year-round base in Finland for a four-person family currently living abroad. The site between cliffs and a fairly steep lakeside beach was chosen during the family’s forest walks. The place overlooks a narrow strait and far out to an open expanse of the lake. In accordance with the site conditions, the building is relatively closed off towards the forest while opening up generously in the direction of the lake.

The house is split by an atrium yard and a covered terrace, on one side of which are small bedrooms and the other more generous living spaces. During the summer the floor layout allows for “complete circulation”. Instead of a separate shoreline sauna building, a sauna was built in connection with the house itself. A covered veranda for cooling off after the sauna separates the sauna from the rest of the building.

In painting the facade with black distemper paint, the building blends with the shadows of the pine forest when viewed from the direction of the lake.

In the interior, the surfaces are mostly untreated domestic wood: birch, pine and common alder. The wood floors are built from vertical-grain pine boards from the family-owned sawmill.

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provides a woodland holiday home appeared first on Dezeen.