00:01The apartment is located in Venves. It's a town at the edge of the city center of Paris.
00:10What is interesting about the building is the fact that it's not very deep,
00:15so it enables to have a lot of light inside the dwellings.
00:21My name is Pierre Escobar. I'm the owner of L'Atelier, a nomadic architecture studio.
00:35The building was built in the 1920s. It's a quite small apartment building.
00:44It was more of a worker's building, so nothing bourgeois in that sense.
00:51What is interesting about the neighborhood is that it's at the end of the metro line,
00:56so it's still part of the city, but it's quite residential and calm.
01:02The apartment is 50 square meters. The client of the project was a family of five,
01:08with two parents, one teenager, a child of 10 years old, and another one of five.
01:14One of their requirements was the ability to change the layout as the family grows.
01:21The apartment was in a very bad condition. It was a one-bedroom unit with a lot of monofunctional spaces.
01:29It had a separate kitchen and an isolated living room, with a lot of space taken up by corridors.
01:35We took away the wall that divided the living room from the hallway, and added the main bedroom.
01:43We kept the bathroom and kitchen in the same place, and added an office which can be entered via the
01:49kitchen.
01:51We added a sleeping area which sits underneath the office, and another sleeping area above the bathroom.
02:01As you enter the apartment, there is a floor-to-ceiling closet made from OSB to your right.
02:09The living area is a bright, open space.
02:13We built a comfortable, custom-made couch in order to fit perfectly into that space,
02:20with storage below and bookshelves above.
02:25This living room acts like a hub which branches out to the kitchen, bathroom, closets and bedrooms.
02:33At the end of the living room, there is a large storage closet where household objects can be stored.
02:41The kitchen is located to the left of the entrance.
02:46We placed all of the kitchen storage and appliances along one wall.
02:51The overall structure of the kitchen was bought in IKEA, but we did custom-made the facades, the handles and
03:00the countertop,
03:01in order to fit with the rest of the apartment's design.
03:07The dining table sits in the kitchen and can be extended to sit up to 8 people.
03:15From within the kitchen, there is a small door with a three-step staircase that leads you to the office.
03:22This used to be a bedroom.
03:24The older child of the family has left for university.
03:28The parents have now converted that room into an office space.
03:34There are now two bedrooms in the apartment.
03:37The first is the children's bedroom.
03:40Through clever use of space, we were able to have two double beds in this room.
03:46One is placed high above the ground and accessed using a ladder.
03:51We took advantage of the high ceilings in the apartment and were able to build the bed on top of
03:58the bathroom which sits directly below.
04:01The other bed sits directly below the office space.
04:06A bedside table was also created using the dead space under the staircase in the office.
04:14The parents' bedroom is located on the other side of the living room.
04:19The client also has placed an office desk in that room.
04:23This modest size room receives plenty of natural light through a window on the right.
04:30All the doors of the apartment are custom-made sliding doors in order to not take up space.
04:37As the bathroom was looking directly to the living room, we decided to create two levels of intimacy.
04:45The first room has a sink, storage and a washing machine.
04:50And leads to a second room with the more intimate activities like toilet and shower.
04:59The choice of materials were quite simple.
05:02We decided for light parkets on the floor and light wood for the custom-made furniture.
05:09The idea of having a small amount of material pallet enables to make the space feel bigger.
05:17With the housing market under pressure and the growing population around the world,
05:22small housing is becoming a reality in Paris.
05:26We think that renovating what already exists is a stepping stone in architecture nowadays,
05:33without demolishing the existing heritage.
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