Collection by Kathy Kline
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The budget was nearly as tight as the space in this cheerful renovation of a 516-square-foot flat in Bratislava. The centerpiece of Lukáš Kordík’s new kitchen is the cabinetry surrounding the sink, a feat he managed by altering the facing and pulls of an off-the-rack Ikea system. The laminate offers a good punch of blue, and in modernist fashion, Kordík forwent door handles in favor of cutouts. “I wanted the kitchen to be one simple block of color without any additional design,” he says.
Tasked with transforming a 93-square-foot brick boiler room into a guesthouse, architect and metalworker Christi Azevedo flexed her creative muscle. The architect spent a year and a half designing and fabricating nearly everything in the structure save for the original brick walls. "I treated the interior like a custom piece of furniture," she says.
"I think that small spaces inherently demand inventiveness," architect Michael Chen says. So when a client presented him with a brief to create a multi-functional element that was kitted out with refrigeration, storage, a beer tap, a humidor, and a dining area, Chen created what he calls a magic box. It boasts an army of features, but discreetly hides them all when not in use. "Sometimes we call them architectural appliances or transformers because that’s what they do," Chen says. "Conceptually they are appliances; experientially we like to think of them as magic boxes because they’re fun in that way."
Mami and Ishii Hideaki (a friend and .......Research employee) prepare lunch in the cozy main building. The room is rustic and utilitarian, with a double-decker wood-burning stove, tons of open storage, and a sink fashioned from galvanized buckets. But there’s an underlying high-design ethos: The wire baskets are handmade classics from Korbo, a Swedish company, and what looks like a paper-wrapped box in front of the stove is actually a leather cushion by Japanese artist Nakano.
The designers fabricated everything in the house, down to the quarter-sawn pine and macrocarpa-wood kitchen cabinetry and concrete floor. “Physically the most challenging part of the build was wrestling an incredibly slippery concrete pump up the muddy driveway in the rain!” says designer Ben Mitchell-Anyon. The enamel pendant light is vintage. Photo by: Paul McCredie
Who says kitchen islands can’t work in small spaces too? A design-minded pair ensures that their tiny seaside getaway in Hampshire, England, is shipshape. At 538 square feet, this home is efficiently designed, with an interior that was influenced by the compact housing that you see in Japan. The kitchen and island have been sized to fit the small space, but the island’s minimal finishings keep it feeling appropriate.
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