Conversion- and kitchen-design, small city-apartment

• New lay-out and kitchen-design: Troels Grum-Schwensen
• Client: Private
• Special kitchen build by Garde-Hvalsøe A/S
• Design and drawings: 2004
• Finished: 2004

 

On a central Copenhagen-address, next to “the lakes” in a building from the seventies, there is, on the 6th floor, this 1-room apartment with balcony and a splendid view.

 

I made a new lay-out and, not in the least, a completely new kitchen-design, in order to create a nice living-area for a young student, recently moved from Aarhus to Copenhagen.

 

My idea was that the new - and not cheap - custom-build kitchen, located in the original “kitchen-niche”, should influence and improve the whole main-room in the apartment. By making a graphic composition with 4 layers in depth, each having a surface of its own, I aimed to make the entire room appear larger. As a kind of “modern baroque”, the shapes go back and forth in depth. Combined with the different textures, this brings the perception of the boundaries of the room into a kind of “vibration”, until it rests at the significant turquoise back-wall.

 

Like the blue sky this colored back-wall, in itself, “draws backwards” from the eye and helps in making the whole room appear larger.

 

Integrated in the dark, eggplant-colored, “frame” is refrigerator, oven, lighting, pedestal drawers and a flap, which, in vertical position will hide away stuff on the tabletop and, in horizontally position, will serve as extended working-plane/table-top.

 

As a delicate piece of furniture, a maple-made corpus with drawers, shoots forward from the calm background of the dark frame.

 

In a similar way the slightly reflective cupboard front contrast the turquoise backwall.