When the client showed me this artist warehouse (previously a printing factory) he’d just bought in Barbès, Paris, he wasn’t really sure how he could make this place comfortable and still keeping the roughness and the nice volume of it. The idea quickly came to fit most of the functions in two separated white boxes, which would allow the apartment to remain as a single space.

The bathroom occupies the first box on the lower part. Above it is a huge closet (80×250x240). Most of the bathroom walls are covered with 5×5 cm grey tiling, following a precise “calepinage”.
The second box is made of a bedroom-mezzanine and a dressing-room below. The front wall of this box is a sliding door : when you open it to go inside the dressing room, it perfectly closes the entrance of the stairs.
The small black pyramidal hole in the door is made for a video-projector, which is set in a box shelf inside the dressing-room.
The dressing-room is a somehow abstract, extremely luminous room with its neon lights and aluminium foil walls, allowing to choose your clothes with a very good color rendering night and day! This well temperature-insulated room makes it a quite good place to keep precious objects, such as wine bottles…
The mezzanine can be totally shut thanks to three motorized blinds, making the bedroom a white cocoon.

The joineries of the large window are used as a “grid” to set the measurements of every element, i.e. the mezzanine, the kitchen cabinets, the bathroom closets, the wood bench…
Created in order to hide the radiators needed under this 7m long window, this wood bench (22mm basic okoumé plywood) brings through its material the cosiness that lacked to the warehouse. The bench is the link between the kitchen and the shelves on the opposite wall.
The kitchen, with integrated appliances, was mostly bought in Ikea and rearranged to fit the project. The counter-top was especially made with the same decorative concrete used for the floor.

from - nicolas brody architect
pics - David Moulinet