Cutwork has designed the full interior concept for three new Paris co-living towers for the startup community working within the world-renowned STATION F co-working campus.
Launching in June 2019, the co-living space, Flatmates, will start moving in 600 residents from French billionaire Xavier Niel’s nearby co-working campus. The building, consisting of 100 shared apartments, café, private lounge bar and space for events, is available to entrepreneurs, freelancers, startups, or staff members working within the STATION F campus.
As an architecture and design studio, Cutwork specializes in coworking, co-living, and new types of hospitality spaces with designs that help build better communities. They were challenged to imagine the future of shared living spaces and to design un-traditional bedrooms and living space to best support these emerging lifestyles and communities.
Working closely with the team at STATION F and project architects Wilmotte & Associés, they designed flexible spaces that can easily adapt throughout the day for how the residents need to use them. This included designing 15 custom pieces of furniture specifically for co-living and shared usages.
Cutwork and STATION F’s first design collaboration was in 2017, when STATION F asked Cutwork to design select interior concepts and custom furniture for the startup campus. Impressed with Cutwork’s design vision and expertise to build thriving communities, STATION F asked Cutwork to design the full concept for the new co-living project.
“In Japanese culture, space is not only defined by the relationships between objects and walls, but also by the interactions and relationships between people. Rather than having a single word for ‘space,’ there are many words for space, each with its own social intention,” says Antonin Yuji Maeno, Cutwork Cofounder and Lead Architect.
“For Flatmates, we developed a community-centered design philosophy with three Japanese words for space: WA 和 – BA 場 – MA 間,” adds Antonin Yuji Maeno. “WA 和 is space for deep focus, introspection, and understanding one’s self in relation to others. BA 場 is space for collaboration, extroversion, and knowledge-sharing. MA 間 is space for the spontaneous and unexpected – the collision of people and ideas.”
“In Japanese culture, a harmony of space is found when all three of these concepts are present. Cutwork designed Flatmates so that the shared spaces can intuitively be arranged and used in each of these ways as the residents need.”
Each apartment is shared by 4-6 residents who have their own compact personal living space and a shared bathroom, kitchen, living room and outdoor balcony. Common social spaces are shared by all residents, and a spacious outdoor area on the ground floor will host events, concerts, etc.
Cutwork designed the interior architecture of 9 different apartment typologies and produced and delivered over 5000 pieces of furniture specifically tailored to the emerging needs of shared urban living.