When the client showed me this artist
warehouse (previously a printing factory) he’d just bought in Barbès,
Paris, he wasn’t really sure how he could make this place comfortable
and still keeping the roughness and the nice volume of it. The idea
quickly came to fit most of the functions in two separated white boxes,
which would allow the apartment to remain as a single space.
The bathroom occupies the first box on
the lower part. Above it is a huge closet (80×250x240). Most of the
bathroom walls are covered with 5×5 cm grey tiling, following a precise
“calepinage”.
The second box is made of a bedroom-mezzanine and a dressing-room below.
The front wall of this box is a sliding door : when you open it to go
inside the dressing room, it perfectly closes the entrance of the
stairs.
The small black pyramidal hole in the door is made for a video-projector, which is set in a box shelf inside the dressing-room.
The dressing-room is a somehow abstract, extremely luminous room with
its neon lights and aluminium foil walls, allowing to choose your
clothes with a very good color rendering night and day! This well
temperature-insulated room makes it a quite good place to keep precious
objects, such as wine bottles…
The mezzanine can be totally shut thanks to three motorized blinds, making the bedroom a white cocoon.
The joineries of the large window are
used as a “grid” to set the measurements of every element, i.e. the
mezzanine, the kitchen cabinets, the bathroom closets, the wood bench…
Created in order to hide the radiators needed under this 7m long window,
this wood bench (22mm basic okoumé plywood) brings through its material
the cosiness that lacked to the warehouse. The bench is the link
between the kitchen and the shelves on the opposite wall.
The kitchen, with integrated appliances, was mostly bought in Ikea and
rearranged to fit the project. The counter-top was especially made with
the same decorative concrete used for the floor.
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