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  • This building was a carpenter workshop, and as we have our house down the road I knew the carpenter very well.

  • And when he retired, I got the opportunity to buy the workshop.

  • What we did was design a space to have friends and family when they visited London.

  • The townhouse here is 40 square metres.

  • It has a footprint of 20 square metres.

  • It was always two floors, but we lifted the roof half a metre so we could get a mezzanine in.

  • Instead of making a bedroom with walls and doors, I made these built-in bed parts.

  • When you go to bed, you are kind of enclosed, so it feels like a treehouse or another little house inside the house.

  • I like to use colours, but in kind of more interventions, like colourful chairs.

  • We have Joe Niemeyer's pictures on the wall here and downstairs, very graphical, but also quite primary colours.

  • The bathroom is bright yellow.

  • Yellow is kind of, I find, a very happy colour, like the sunflower and the sunshine.

  • At the same time, the house is quite calm with its white walls and wood, but still some playfulness with some different accents of colours.

  • I furnished the house with chairs and also tables that are upcycled from old chairs and tables that I picked up in the street or in junk shops.

  • These are frames that I have stripped.

  • I made up the seats and the backs and do the upholsteries.

  • They're quite cartoonish and fun, you know, in their shapes and a bit exaggerated shapes.

  • It gives the space more personality.

  • The lamps I designed for this house here are designed in a square wooden section in oak.

  • To maximise the light in the space, we have put in a big skylight, which is south-facing.

  • We then also transfer it down to the lower ground floor with a big glass panel in the floor.

  • Like in any small spaces, you have to find places where you can put your storage, kind of hide it away.

  • So here we have storage under the bed.

  • We've got storage under the stairs.

  • In the kitchen, we have obviously a dishwasher and a washing machine and appliances that are needed.

  • We've got a hot boiling tap, so we don't need to have a kettle there.

  • In small spaces, every little square inch matters.

  • This is more like designing a boat or a caravan.

  • How do you create comfortable bedding?

  • How do you create enough storage and comfortable seating that doesn't take up space you haven't got?

  • I think the compromise is that if it's well designed, it doesn't feel smaller. www.microsoft.com

This building was a carpenter workshop, and as we have our house down the road I knew the carpenter very well.

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