Good design starts with a good brief, and, in our case, the existing building WAS the brief: the 240 sqm ground floor of a1930 villa, generous enough to let us play with its corridors and large rooms with ample glass-wand doors, to accommodate the offices for a video production company.
The work in the production office is intrinsically defined by dynamism and continuous change; no project is similar to another, and for each one, different teams allocated, and lots of project based people coming and going. A hustle and bustle that needs to be contained and balanced through a simple and decluttered environment. Our design objective was to create an adaptive, neutral and versatile space.
This, along with the respect for the history of this old house, leads us to a very simple and bare aesthetic theme.
We kept everything to the essentials - chromatic scheme, furniture and decor, number of textures responsible for the atmosphere, and shapes and patterns involved in the design equation.
Function wise, we aimed for minimal interventions by simply eliminating some doors and filling the walls, to make the circulation flow simpler and create more walls for easy furniture distribution. As a characteristic of interbelic villas, the plan layout had a central ample hall, accessed from the main entrance and from the secondary back one, with all rooms distributed around it; therefore, we kept the initial intention, and made this central hallway not only a transitional space, but a welcoming one, that communicates transparently with the adjacent rooms, which are accommodating common working areas. In the other rooms, attached through a long and narrow corridor, we positioned a meeting room, accounting department and the executive office.
The narrow corridor presented as a challenge, with its ceiling sectioned by transversal beams, no natural light and 1.1 m width. A hostile passageway, that was reconfigured with an arched ceiling (making the volume more embracing) and a new lighting scheme, consisting in globular translucent wall sconces (to expand the width).
For the executive office, a custom designed wallpaper was installed (created with black and white large-scale pattern, with emphasis on curvilinear shapes), and the new furniture pieces were chosen as neutral as possible, in order to match the existing desk, which was a mandatory to keep.
The meeting room is our declaration of authenticity and honesty, since our decisions were not based on pure aesthetic criteria, but on carrying on the history of the house. So, the original ceramic stove (with a debatable beauty) kept its position in the corner, as a silent witness of past and present, without any other functional meaning today; the ceiling lights were the ones existing in the previous design, from 15 years ago and. the other elements - furniture, wall colors and wall art, were carefully chosen to have a coherent dialogue the existing pieces. The decor of this room is an open question about what beauty is: whether it is related to aesthetic rules or to a meaningful story.
Throughout the space, we experimented with few design extravaganzas, one being the plinth, which features a custom BW graphic, inspired from the clapperboard….the item that pops into our minds when we think about the film production. We wanted the plinth to “hold the space” as usually is intended to, but in a more nonconformist and loud way, being a disruptive design element that is meant to be unexpected and visually stimulative.
Along with the plinth, we decided to play with a cold grey wall base (to make a good counterpoint to the warm colored floor) with a zig zag motif, that is intended for bring some fun into the design.
The working areas are kept simple and versatile, while the reception is more elaborated, with curvilinear elements, and the only colored presences in the rooms are the artwork on the walls, sourced from a very dear local artist.
Because the original parquet floor was extremely deteriorated and the process of taking it out and replacing the underneath layers is very costly and complicated, we chose to use is as an underlay and cover it with LVT flexible boards, with a warm color and a tactile feeling, to resemble the earth beneath our feet and our connection with it.
The light scheme is simple, with warm ambiental light distributed uniformly from ceiling, contributing to the initial intention of a decluttered space.
