£25,000 in Adaptive Grinding Gives Small London Flat ‘Rooms in a Room’

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Project details:

Location: London, Great Britain

photographer: Nicholas Worley / @nicholasvorlei_

From the architect: “The Green Machine was born out of a need to rethink how to live in a compact studio apartment in East London by providing adaptable spaces that suit different uses such as sleeping, eating, working, entertaining, lounging etc. Our client, a young professional, struggled to make a small studio apartment work for all her needs, especially since these needs extended to working from home during the pandemic. The design strategy focused on narrow £25,000 budget on the grouping of millwork elements resulting in a bold intervention in one 97 square foot zone to create more ‘rooms within rooms’.”

“The Green Machine shows that impactful sustainable design can happen at any scale and on any budget. The use of paint and paint to repurpose and refinish rather than remove and replace, as well as the thoughtful selection of materials for the millwork elements resulted in both a beautiful and environmentally responsible solution to our client’s task. The challenge was to find something for the mill zone, where there will be an intervention, but to be equally bold and fun, which would be equally daring and fun to manipulate and ecological. Valchromat fits perfectly. As a FCS-certified non-toxic MDF wood, it is not only moisture-resistant and fire-resistant, but is also produced from recycled pine wood and mill waste. The bold colors are created with organic dyes and unlike most artificial boards, Valchromat can be recycled at the end of its life. century.

“The Green Machine is a project that shows that with carefully orchestrated programming, thoughtful materiality and joyful details, architecture can really be a ‘machine’ for contemporary living. By working closely with local merchants, designing flexible and adaptable zones that respond not only to specific needs, but also to future desires, with a large inset space into a flat color storage space, transforming this into a space rethinking the way on which we live”.