Hasta La Ideas

A suspended steel staircase is completed by a piece of wooden furniture in this renovated Oslo loft by London studio Haptic (+ slideshow).

Haptic created the split-level Idunsgate apartment in the upper levels of a nineteenth-century apartment block. The new staircase connects living spaces on the lower storey with a mezzanine above, but also creates a subtle divide between the kitchen and lounge.

Made from powder-coated white steel, the staircase hangs down from a ceiling beam and wall overhead. Its narrow vertical supports form a balustrade, while open risers allow views through from below.

As the stairs descend, they stop before reaching the floor, so residents have to step down over a piece of wooden furniture that functions as both a chest of drawers and a window seat.

On one side of the staircase is a white-painted living area featuring a low-slung sofa and white mesh chair, while the other side is a kitchen and dining area finished in dark grey.

“The original kitchen was tight, inefficient and north facing,” said architect Tomas Stokke, describing the old layout. “By moving it into the common areas we could create a light, airy and spacious space that becomes the social heart.”

An oak worktop doubles as a breakfast bar with room for two. There is also a small fireplace that creates a cooking space at the end of the kitchen worktop.

A double-height bathroom sits beside the living area and is finished in polished concrete and grey stone. The bath and shower are raised up, so residents have to climb up a small staircase to access them.

Upstairs, the hallway connecting the bedroom with the stairs becomes a viewing platform over the living space below. It also leads out to a small sheltered roof terrace.

Photography is by Simon Kennedy and Inger Marie Grini.

Here’s a project description from Haptic:

Idunsgate, Oslo

The apartment is in the top floor of a 19th century apartment building in central Oslo in Norway. Purchasing the loft space above the apartment enabled the client to do a full scale refurbishment of the loft, bringing the two floors into one, unified space.

Through a thorough three-dimensional survey of the apartment and careful assessment of the means of escape, we were able to incorporate every nook and cranny and even part of the stairwell into the design.

By fully utilising the level changes and opportunities we could introduce spatial drama with substantial vertical sight lines. The en-suite bathroom to the master bedroom is organised over three levels by incorporating found spaces. A sunny terrace has a large glass wall that brings evening light deep into the apartment. Some loft space has been sacrificed to create a double height space over the living room.

The centrepiece of the apartment is the feature staircase connecting the two levels. A modular, powder-coated, white steel stair is suspended between the joists and connects to a low storage/sofa unit that runs along the front façade.

The bathroom incorporated several level changes, and by using large scale 100x300cm tiles, the impression is of one that is carved out of a single block of stone.

The original kitchen was tight, inefficient and north facing. By moving it into the common areas we could create a light, airy and spacious space that becomes the social heart and integrates with the rest of the apartment. A small fireplace is integrated into the kitchen worktop and the kitchen fronts are painted to match the colour of the fireplace.

Typology: Refurbishment and loft conversion
Client: Gullestad/Skavlan
Architect: Haptic Architects
Team: Nikki Butenschøn, Aleksandra Danielak, Peder Skavlan

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Idunsgate Apartment by Haptic appeared first on Dezeen.

Zaha Hadid has completed a Hong Kong boutique for Stuart Weitzman – her latest sinuous store interior for the American footwear designer.

Stuart Weitzman commissioned architect Zaha Hadid to design a series of stores for his shoe label. This second branch is located in Hong Kong’s IFC shopping mall.

The boutique is surrounded by glass walls to maximise the exposure of the products in the busy retail environment. “The adaptive design of the IFC store expresses the dynamism of the city and reflects the quality and craftsmanship of Stuart Weitzman’s shoes,” said Hadid.

A large sculptural element extends from the walls and spans across the ceiling, then swoops down to create a niche in front of the glass walls for showcasing the shoes.

More footwear is displayed on a pair of freestanding metallic platforms with two levels, connected by fibrous elements that form the bases. Products also line the walls on thin shelves, which are subtly illuminated with hidden lighting.

The first in the chain designed by Hadid opened in Milan last September. Similar stores are set to open London and Beijing later in 2014, and across Asia and the Middle East over the next few years.

Hadid previously designed a series monochrome boutiques for Milan-based fashion designer Neil Barrett.

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Weitzman opens in Hong Kong appeared first on Dezeen.

Architecture studio AOC has renovated a four-storey townhouse in north London, adding wall-hung vintage bicycles and timber mouldings based on the faces of the resident family.

Named Bonhôte House, the nineteenth-century property was remodelled by London-based AOC to create a contemporary family home for a boutique owner, a film producer and their young children.

The house now features an open-plan interior designed to meet the family’s need for space, with a two-storey-high gallery added for displaying vintage bicycles and artwork.

A large portion of the original ground floor was removed, enabling the architects to create the double-height gallery at the front of the house.

The new entrance hall allows natural light to fill the room through an original Victorian window with folding shutters. Two bicycles hang on hooks from an adjacent wall, ensuring that they can be seen from various angles.

Shelving built into the walls provides a space for displaying the family’s large collection of books and objects.

“The family had a fascinating collection of artefacts they wished to display, from Dan Holdsworth prints to Paris flea market nicknacks,” architect Geoff Shearcroft told Dezeen.

To add character, the architects used the facial profiles of each family member to produce a series of bespoke timber mouldings, which are dotted throughout the interior.

These create a ripple effect when joined together and act as a contemporary counterpoint to the original Victorian skirting boards and architraves.

“Much ornament in architecture has the human form as its basis and we continued this tradition with a very literal translation of facial profile into moulding,” said Shearcroft.

Across the lower ground floor, a tiled floor with a basket-weave pattern connects the living space with the kitchen and provides a hard-wearing surface for the growing family.

“We explored a variety of patterns but the basket weave offered the right combination of rich associations, closed openness and playful variation,” said the architect.

In the kitchen, mirrored laminate surfaces create an extension of the pattern and reflect light back into the room.

A slumped concrete sofa sits at the foot of a brass decorative staircase, which leads up to bedrooms and bathrooms on the first floor.

Continuing up through the property, the original floor plan has been altered to connect the master bedroom to an en suite that overlooks the park.

“We re-configured the plan to create a series of different character spaces that were visually and vertically connected,” added Shearcroft.

The house is located in Stoke Newington, just a stone’s throw away from Dezeen’s offices. AOC Architecture previously remodelled an Edwardian property in Golders Green, north-west London.

Photography is by Tim Soar.

Here’s a description of Bonhôte House from the architects:

Bonhôte House, Stoke Newington, London

The Bonhôte House is a four storey townhouse in Stoke Newington, home to a film producer, a boutique owner and their young children. The couple needed more room for a growing family, and for their contemporary art and vintage bicycle collections, than their previous Shoreditch, East London mews house offered. They asked AOC to design a home that felt big yet intimate, luxurious yet useful, sophisticated yet playful, beautiful yet cosy.

The original 19th century property was narrow, dark and unwelcoming, and had been stripped bare by its previous owners. A key architectural move has been to remove a large area of floor, merging basement and ground levels at the front of the house to create a generous double height gallery, into which a new decorative stair descends from the entrance hall. This act of opening-up brings natural light into the basement living space, and creates expansive walls for display of large artworks and objects and for storage of valuable books.

On the upper levels, non-structural walls have been relocated to shape a range of spaces appropriate to the family’s lives. Throughout the property, new doors and internal windows connect individual rooms while maintaining distinctions between them, offering glimpses through the house itself, and then out into the city beyond.

The family wanted a characterful home, contemporary in tone without feeling ‘new’. In response, AOC enriched bare walls with bespoke timber profiles created from the facial profiles of family members – a reinterpretation of traditional mouldings. Used as skirtings, architraves and linings, these ornamental features ensure each room is uniquely tailored to its inhabitants. In the lower, more public, levels, all four mouldings are combined to create a rippling timber lining that softens and connects.

A unique domestic character has been created through deploying a range of materials, chosen for their associative qualities, to create diverse surface effects. A slumped concrete sofa, tinted green, anchors the new staircase at the centre of the plan, before evolving into a kitchen work surface. The use of mirrored laminate on storage units helps them dissolve into their surroundings, while providing endless games of reflection for the children. A basket weave floor pattern, used in a variety of scales and materials, reinforces the individual characters of different parts of the house whilst creating a coherent whole.

The architects worked closely with the family to ensure the house could support the visual choreography of special objects, while still being a practical space, able to manage their storage needs in a discreet, integrated way. The subsequent combination of bespoke panelling with open shelves, interspersed with glazed, mirror and even secret doors, bestows an ‘instant maturity’ upon the home, as though the family have been there for generations.

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flooring to London townhouse appeared first on Dezeen.

Layers of sand that resemble a mountainous landscape will gradually move and change shape for the duration of this installation by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo for skincare brand Aesop‘s New York pop-up shop.

The installation at The Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn was created by Escobedo to reflect its temporal setting and the idea of natural ornamentation espoused by Modernist architectural theorist Adolf Loos.

“Inspired by this principle, this installation for Aesop reflects the passing of time in the way of an inverse sedimentation,” explained Escobedo in a statement displayed alongside the work.

A simple wooden structure, which also references the minimal aesthetic favoured by Modernist architects, supports and frames the glass panels containing black and white sand. The sand has been poured into gaps between the glass sheets, creating striated patterns that look like the peaks and valleys of a mountain range.

The sand will gradually sift through and out the bottom of the glass panel, causing the patterns to evolve over the five month period of the pop-up shop’s residency.

“Installed in springtime in New York, it also recalls melting snow, Les Eaux de Mars, a change of season, optimism and expectation,” Escobedo explained.

Aesops’s products surround the space containing the artwork, which also features a freestanding vintage sink that echoes the raw, industrial backdrop of the gallery space.

Aesop is renowned for its unique shops created by leading architects and designers, including one in Kyoto with light fitting taken from squid fishing boats and another in New York with a ceiling covered in copies of The Paris Review.

Photography is by Rafael Gamo.

Here’s some more information from Aesop:

Aesop pop-up at The Invisible Dog

Aesop is honoured to partner with The Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn to present a temporary installation designed by architect Frida Escobedo. Launched on March 13, the innovative retail space will operate until the end of July.

While its main business is skin, hair and body care, Aesop has long nurtured a passionate interest in all forms of creative expression, and is well known for collaborations with individual practitioners and organizations alike. The endeavor sees the brand join with a New York exemplar of community-focused cultural engagement and one of the foremost proponents of Latin American Modernism.

The installation’s centerpiece is a timber-framed glass enclosure containing meticulously segmented layers of sand that will shift over the next five months. Escobedo speaks of this feature having dual interpretations. In a materiality and form, it reference Modernism’s shift away from ornamentation. And in keeping with one of Escoebdo’s central concerns, it reflects temporality of its setting. The design is also influenced by Aesop’s distinctive aesthetic, which the architect sees as aligned with the Japanese principle of shibusa or ‘sophisticated austerity’.

Aesop selected the location because of its deep ties with the neighborhood and by the creative space and support network it provides for artists. The Invisible Dog manages to combine residency studios for artists, venues for exhibits and performances, and community engagement. Established in 2009 and nestled between Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and Boreum Hill, this interdisciplinary space is an exemplar of self-sustained, community-focused cultural engagement; and an acclaimed hub for experimentation and collaboration among artists.

Aesop was founded in Melbourne in 1987 and today offers its superlative formulations in signature stores and counters around the world and online. As the company evolves, meticulously considered design remains paramount to the creative of each space.

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Frida Escobedo’s installation for Aesop appeared first on Dezeen.

Berlin studio J. Mayer H. has returned to Volkswagen’s Autostadt visitor centre, at the German car brand’s factory in Wolfsburg, to create a landscape of three-dimensional structures for children to interact with (+ slideshow).

J. Mayer H. was first commissioned by Volkswagen to build an exhibition space focussing on sustainability. Four years after completing it, the architects returned to create a space targeted specifically at children in the Autostadt‘s reception.

Named MobiVersum, the installation was conceived as a “playful learning landscape” of solid wood sculptures that present challenges to different motor skills. Children of all ages can clamber over or climb inside each of the shapes.

“Depending on their individual level of development, children can interact freely with the installation on various levels on their own or with their siblings or parents,” said the architects in a statement.

The designers liken the curving branch-like forms to tree roots and trunks, intended to create a dialogue with the leafy green tones of the Level Green exhibition on the floor above.

“The shape of the imaginative, playful structures of solid wood are reminiscent of roots and tree trunks under the luscious branches of Level Green,” they said.

The team worked with Osnabrück University professor Renate Zimmer to curate the exhibition, making sure it provides children with a broad introduction to all facets of sustainability.

Photography is by Uwe Walter.

Here’s the project description from the architects:

MobiVersum

In 2013, J. Mayer H. designed MobiVersum as a new interaction surface for young visitors to Autostadt Wolfsburg, integrated as part of the overall context of Autostadt “People, Cars, and What Moves Them”.

A playful learning landscape was developed for a wide range of experiences in dialog with the exhibition Level Green shown on the floor above. MobiVersum provides an active introduction to the subject of sustainability in all its facets for children of all ages: from the issue of mobility, joint learning and understanding, to courses in cooking. In collaboration with Renate Zimmer (professor, Institut für Sport- und Bewegungswissenschaft at Universiät Osnabrück) a large movement sculpture was created that is unique in terms of its design and the challenges it presents to children’s motor skills. Depending on their individual level of development, children can interact freely with the installation on various levels on their own or with their siblings or parents, engaging with the challenges presented by the sculpture for their motor skills.

The shape of the imaginative, playful structures of solid wood are reminiscent of roots and tree trunks under the luscious branches of Level Green. The sculptures, which can be used and entered, structure diversified spatial zones with different thematic emphases and inspire the children’s curiosity to discover and explore. Children as tomorrow’s consumers can thus learn early on the importance of a responsible approach to the world’s resources, for they represent our ecological/economical and social future.

Against the backdrop of the growing relevance of individual responsibility for sustainably approach to global resources, an exhibition on sustainability was already installed at Autostadt Wolfsburg in 2007. The exhibition and experiential surface Level Green, also designed by J. Mayer H., explains the focus on sustainability interactively to the visitors of the Autostadt. Art + Com, Berlin designed and implemented the content of the interactive media used especially for this purpose.

The metaphor of the expansive network with many branches was developed from the familiar PET symbol, one of the first prominent symbols of an increased awareness in environmental protection. By translating the two dimensional graphic to a three-dimensional structure and altering it step by step, the result was a complex structure that makes the essentially abstract quality of the subject graspable on a spatial level.

Together, MobiVersum and Level Green form a synthesis for all generations to explore knowledge in depth, to enjoy their own experiences, and to learn playfully.

Client: Autostadt GmbH, Wolfsburg
Site: Volkswagen GroupForum, Ground Floor, Autostadt, Wolfsburg
Total floor area: approx. 1600 sqm
Architect: J. MAYER H. Architects, Berlin
Project team: Juergen Mayer H., Christoph Emenlauer, Marta Ramírez Iglesias, Simon Kassner, Jesko Malcolm Johnsson-Zahn, Alexandra Virlan, Gal Gaon

Architect on site: Jablonka Sieber Architekten, Berlin
Structural engineering steel construction: SFB Saradschow Fischedick, Berlin
Structural engineering wood construction: SJB.Kempter.Fitze AG, CH-Eschenbach
Building services: Brandi IGH, Salzgitter
Light engineers: Lichttransfer, Berlin
General contractor: Lindner Objektdesign GmbH
Contractor wood construction: Hess Timber

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huge shapes for children to clamber over appeared first on Dezeen.