Sheet 05InteriorSemester 3 · September 2024At the scale of a room

Studio Apartment

One room for Zoey, a law student who makes jewellery, reads, films and has friends over, and for Felix, her cat.

Brief: A compact home for an imagined resident, set by the studio
Drawings: Civil, furniture and flooring plans, four sections, an inhabited isometric, three pieces of furniture
Medium: Pencil and watercolour

Watercolour isometric of the studio apartment with its roof lifted off: a red sofa and green chairs, a long desk, a tall open shelf dividing the room, plants and pictures on the walls. — 01Inhabited isometric, roof lifted off.

Bed, desk and sofa share one room.

The isometric shows it all at once: bed, seating, desk, shelves and plants in one enclosure, with the kitchen and bathroom along its edges.

The question I kept asking was what could share. A shelf can divide the room and still hold books. A floor can tell you where the kitchen ends.

A bank of potted plants painted in watercolour, monstera, fiddle-leaf fig and snake plants, against a red hill, with a white cat asleep among the pots. — 02From the cover of the semester’s portfolio.

The shell

Four walls and a balcony. Then Zoey moves in.

Before any furniture, the civil layout: the bare shell at 1:20, every wall, column, door and window dimensioned. Twenty feet of room, fifteen deep, a five-foot balcony past the glass doors, and the bathroom and entrance tucked to one side.

The furniture plan is traced off the same lines, so one lies exactly over the other.

Civil layout at 1:20: the empty shell of the apartment in fine pen, every wall, column, door and window dimensioned, with a north point.

The same plan furnished in watercolour: green kitchen, terracotta floor, the red sofa on a striped rug, the timber-floored bedroom with a mandala rug, the bath, and the tiled balcony.

03 Furniture layoutCivil layout, 1:20

Four floors in one room.

Instead of walls, the floor changes. Four materials mark where one part of the day ends and the next begins: white ceramic for the wet room, terracotta from the front door through the kitchen to the sofa, timber boards where she sleeps and works, porcelain out on the balcony.

The legend from my flooring sheet, with its four painted samples.

Flooring plan in watercolour: white tiles in the bath, terracotta tiles through the entry, kitchen and living area, timber boards in the bedroom, and porcelain tiles with small dark diamonds on the balcony.

04 Flooring layoutSamples shown to one scale

Sections

Four cuts through the room.

Section lines A to D cross the plan. The sections add what it leaves out: shelving, storage, the wall treatment, how high things sit.

The furniture plan, with section lines A to D.

Section A–A′ looking south: a window seat, a long desk with two green chairs, the television, the red sofa beneath open shelves, and an arched door painted green and peach.

Section B–B′ looking north: the front door, green kitchen cabinets under a patterned backsplash, pendant lamps, a tall mirror, the bed beneath a curved wall shelf, and plants on the balcony.

Section C–C′ looking west: the green-tiled bathroom beside the kitchen with its fridge and washing machine.

Section D–D′ looking east: the television on its table in front of tall glass doors, hangings on a peach wall, and an open cubby shelf full of plants and books.

Section B–B′ · looking northDrag the red line, or press A, B, C or D

Three pieces of furniture take on more work.

Each piece does at least two jobs, so the room doesn’t have to.

Cat shelf, hand-lettered. — A shelf with a route through it
Round openings for Felix to climb through, hollows for potted plants, a scratching post at the end.

Isometric of the cat shelf: staggered timber shelves with round openings for a cat to pass through, hollows for potted plants and a scratching post. — A shelf with a route through it
Round openings for Felix to climb through, hollows for potted plants, a scratching post at the end.

Plan and three elevations of a television table on a pivot. — A table that turns
The television sits on a table that rotates, so the screen can face the bed or the sofa.

Isometric of a single bed with a deep drawer pulled out from beneath the mattress. — A bed with a cellar
The depth below the mattress becomes two drawers.

In three dimensions

The room, in the round.

3D models of the room and its three pieces of furniture, made for this site from my drawings.

Loading the model

Open the room

Wet room and colour

Green tile and a red sofa.

Bird’s-eye view into the bathroom: green tiled walls, a round mirror, a washbasin on a timber counter and a shower. — 05Bathroom, bird’s-eye view.

I chose the colours with Zoey in mind: a red sofa, sage chairs, mint for the kitchen, peach cushions. Plants, books and collections are drawn in as part of the room.

They became this website’s colours too, sampled straight from these sheets. The red you click is the sofa.

Sofa red Chair sage Kitchen mint Floor timber Cushion peach

Academic work, Semester 3. Zoey and Felix come from the studio brief.