In the centre of Milan an old soap factory from the 19th century was transformed into lofts. One loft was restructured to become a combination of home and office.
Every space or building is like a person, it always has a characterwith pretty and ugly sides. When working on an interior project, I always try to identify the features that give the space its personality and work with these elements to bring out its natural beauty without being invasive. You can draw an easy parallel with a make-up artist that can make a person look prettier, more attractive without other people even realising that person is wearing make-up at all. You just see that person has “something”.
For a while, my wife Paulina and I were looking for a loft that could be a home and an office at the same time. This is a contradictio-in-terminis because how do you give an open space the cosy private nesting feeling to your family, and contemporarily make it an efficientand professional office?
The solution was provided by the space itself... The old, very thick wooden factory floor combined with the arches gave the space a welcoming and comforting feeling. The tall windows and ceiling light made the space literally bathe in light, creating a feeling of great lightness.At the same time we had multiple 50 cm tall I-beams holding up a metallic corrugated sheet ceiling and the entrance to the subterranean parking garage ran straight through our future living room. The project focused on how to give these negative the same “industrial lightness” already present in other aspects of the space.
The car corridor passing through the loft created a 12m2 platform. This gave us the idea of creating a glass version of the raised "supervisor's office", including a 4,5m tall sliding glass door.Theacoustically isolated office space respected the visual openness of the entire loft and preserved the abundant flow of light. Floor and ceiling were covered in a 6 layered resin to create a warm deep concrete feeling.
The I-beams were very prominent in proportion to the space. In order to make them lighter, L-profiles were welded onto the vertical part of the I-beams to recreate the top part of the beams. This gave us the support for the fake ceiling, and created the technical space for air-conditioning, lights, electricity, etc… The final result was that the originally very heavy I-beams became delicate like chopsticks, and this without being untrue to the nature of their function.
During office hours, the dining room transforms into the meeting room by hiding the kitchen in an oversized closet. When opening the kitchen, the doors disappear completely like an accordion in hidden compartments on both sides of the counter. The colour pallet of the kitchen goes from white for the oversized front doors, over grey for the cabinets, and black lava stone to cover the back of the kitchen. A powerful, professional exhaust fan kept food smells contained in the open space.
With non-invasive interventions that stay true to the industrial heritage, we managed to sand of the rough edges of the industrial feeling and allowed the space to easily switch from an office to a home and vice versa.
The semi-underground floor used to be the decanting tubs. Being isolated from the open space upstairs, it was an obvious choice to make the private area here. The space was transformed into a large sleeping room with dressing room and bathroom. A low wall runs around the space, hiding air-conditioning, air-filtering system and the illumination that highlights the brick vault.
The project took around 4 years from start to end.
