UK practice MWAI has recently designed this compact London apartment as if it were a hotel suite. The studio has reimagined this one-bedroom apartment in a Mayfair Mansion block for a busy, professional who wanted a minimalist, uncluttered ‘pied-a-terre’ while working in London and Internationally.
The apartment was old and tired on the purchase, and the previous configuration did not make the most of its best attributes. To create an elegant, efficient footprint MWAI removed and replaced all the walls, floors and ceilings and remade the apartment making the most of the limited space available.
The main challenge was to maximize the useable space — therefore a lot of attention was given to minimizing the footprint of the WC and kitchen by incorporating them into an inhabited pod in the centre of the plan. The reconfigured WC is now accessed off the bedroom, using a sliding partition to separate rooms, and the kitchen is now integrated into the access wall from the corridor.
To keep the interior sleek yet function, the design team developed bespoke concealed storage and collaborated with specialist joiners for bespoke kitchen & living room cabinetry, complete with a folding work desk.
“Our design uses a modern, waterproof cement polymer render in the bathroom to create a textured minimal wet room,” said the practice. This is offset against industrial fixtures and accented by the sanitaryware. The texture of the cement render picks up the subtle recessed lighting creating a sense of depth & movement in the wall covering.
Other architecture firms that have created clever, space-saving solutions for compact apartments include European firm l’atelier, which designed a 50 SQM apartment in Paris for a family of 5.
