Architects: SWAN Architectes
Location: Montmartre, Paris, France
Project area: 25 sqm
Project year: 2010
Photographs: Maxime Vantorre
In any small Parisian apartment, maximizing the living space is essential. Prior to its renovation, this Montmartre apartment lacked both natural light and generous spaces. Its new design offers a minimal yet functional two step process.
The existing plain wooden wall, that used to strongly divide the dwelling space, is reduced to its bare structure, creating a filter between the night and day zones within the studio apartment. The deconstructed wall is utilized as a display shelf, allowing the sunshine to reach the entire apartment.
The support spaces (bathroom, toilets, storage and kitchen) are anchored to the back wall of the apartment in a cubist arrangement of extruded red and white blocks.
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- © Maxime Vantorre
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- © Maxime Vantorre
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- © Maxime Vantorre
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- © Maxime Vantorre
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- © Maxime Vantorre
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- © Maxime Vantorre
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- © Maxime Vantorre
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- plan
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- elevation 01
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- elevation 02
red and white… indicputable combination…
Some cupboards and a (tiny) kitchen. Inspired.
I always think when you create a single space from multiple spaces you reduce the perceived volume.
When you have multiple spaces your mind is free to form sub-conscious relationships, distances and volumes about the spaces you have but cannot see – that is you are not in… this gives agreater spatial complexity and dimension to the total space that ‘opening-up’ spaces reduces because it all ‘hangs out’.
Letting it all ‘hang out’ is great for expressing the living style that you have just dropped into a large industrially inappropriate space and ‘weighed’ anchor at various points within it for your sleeping, living and washing…
but to do this you need to ‘open up’ a vast space with significant no-mans land between your active areas…