The key to working happily at home
(Image credit: Makoto Suzuki)
From converted barns and factories to stackable ateliers, what is the ultimate live-work space? Clare Dowdy talks to designers and creatives about their set-ups around the world.
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Some designers and architects have had live-work set-ups for years. Their light-touch conversions of industrial spaces into aesthetic ateliers have long been an inspiration to others. “Conservation is a great starting point. Designers did it out of necessity, they couldn’t afford to knock it all down and start again,” says developer Simeon Anderson. Now that many of us are likely to continue working from home to some degree, what can we learn from these old hands? Because perching at the kitchen island or squatting in the spare bedroom ad infinitum isn’t the answer. There’s a risk that quality of lives (both home and work) will suffer. “This last year has been about making do,” says architect Richard Parr, “now it’s about creating a proper space.”
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Parr sowed the seeds for his live-work arrangement 15 years ago, when he bought a cluster of farm buildings – including a hay loft, cow shed, dairy barn and bull pen – in the Cotswolds, UK. He and his family live in one of the buildings, and his studio is set up in others. “I wanted a hub as vibrant as a studio in London, working in one place but not around the kitchen table.”
Architect Richard Parr converted a group of farm buildings in the UK countryside to create a live-work space (Credit: Richard Parr)
The latest to be renovated into extra workspace is a former grain loft. “I wanted all the benefits of being at home but not the disadvantages,” he tells BBC Culture, defining the benefits as a lovely location and lack of commute, which means more time. The downsides as he sees them are the intrusion of work into family life, a sense of claustrophobia, and getting enmeshed in the family routine. But, with his seconds-only commute to work, he says, “I don’t hear children and they don’t hear me”.
Parr treats his studios as primary rather than secondary space. “Don’t use all your left-overs from the house to furnish the office,” he warns. “You owe it to yourself to buy the right tools to work.” For him, that includes the big glass table he designed, which allows him to see the floor, and so adds to the feeling of space. And by putting it in the middle of the room, he and his team can work at different seats, because “you shouldn’t sit mono-directionally” or facing one direction.
The daily commute has at least one upside, as it takes you to a different place. Even in live-work environments, Parr believes in a sense of separation, with the work areas needing to be energised with different light levels, clean surfaces and fresh air. “Bleeding the two is a recipe for disaster.”
The interior of Parr’s space in the rural Cotswolds has a cosy, rustic feel (Credit: Richard Parr)
Not so for Rana Haddad and Pascal Hachem. Co-founders of art-and-design studio 200Grs in Beirut’s industrial zone, they are in their live-work space from 9am to 11pm. Only the Lebanese capital’s zoning laws force them to leave for a residential area at bedtime.
Haddad and Hachem epitomise the immersive lifestyle associated with some creative industries. “We don’t relate to what we do as a job, it is rather our everyday life, a way of living,” says Haddad. “We both believe that the best way to design is by being fully immersed – immersed in testing, feeling, trying out, living the moment. The more time we spend playing with materials, the more we inspired we get.”
So rather than keeping home and work separate, their workshop feels like home, with domestic functions visible behind a simple glass partition, which reduces noise and dust. The place is full of houseplants collected by the duo on trips abroad, their flea-market finds, and “vintage pieces of furniture from old hotels that we bought at auction every time an old space was being torn down,” Hachem adds.
This art-and-design studio, 200grs, in Beirut has a home-from-home feel, and is full of quirky flea-market finds (Credit: 200grs)
The creative and domestic heart of the space is a big table on which “we sketch, do model making, have our meetings, breakfasts, lunches and dinners,” says Haddad. “The table’s display changes according to the project that we’re working on. We also entertain our friends there.”
While 200Grs have thoroughly mixed the ingredients of their home and work lives, Japanese architect Makoto Suzuki has devised a collection of separate but interlocking structures for his set-up. On Hokkaido island near Sapporo, these timber-clad buildings house Suzuki’s living and working spaces, as well as his wife’s office, a weekend retreat for his father, and a studio for sculptor Takenobu Igarashi. In Suzuki’s design, the communal rooms are in the middle, and their glazed walls give views into the various workspaces around the edge. There are also views into adjacent rooms via small internal windows.
Home from home
Suzuki knew what he and his co-users wanted and was able to design accordingly. But at Wohnregal, a new block in Berlin, architecture firm FAR (frohn&rojas) couldn’t second-guess how tenants would want to use the flats. Marc Frohn’s aim was to “address the fact that there is no one way that people want to live-work today”. So rather than designing for a specific type of person, they stacked six pre-fabricated warehouse structures. “This allowed us to design a different floor plan for each floor. There’s a great variety of different live-work ateliers in the building.”
A collection of timber-clad buildings on Hokkaido island, Japan, provides a variety of homes that are also ateliers (Credit: Makoto Suzuki)
In some units, oversized doors and curtains can close off work areas or open them up to the living area. They also allow the occupants to adjust the levels of daylight and privacy. “When working, the large glass surfaces offer well-lit interiors. Curtains can be closed to create intimacy or privacy,” Frohn adds. Wohnregal’s residents include salespeople, academics, entrepreneurs and two architects, one of whom is Frohn himself.
FAR gave the modest units high ceilings to make them feel spacious, borrowing from the industrial aesthetic of those original creatives’ live-work spaces. At the other end of the scale, Anderson is behind a 6,000sq-ft pad with a well-heeled creative – or someone who aspires to that aesthetic – in mind.
Wotton Works in north-west London is a remodelled aircraft factory, with open-plan offices downstairs and a penthouse above. Here it’s all double-height spaces with mezzanines, exposed masonry alongside trendy finishes like clay render, and new windows. For Anderson, it’s about “keeping the aesthetic of the honest industrial, and designers share that view”.
An old aircraft factory in London has been re-modelled to create open-plan offices with a penthouse above (Credit: Wotton Works)
There’s so much room at Wotton Works that people could work on the floor. Again, Anderson is borrowing from the designers’ approach. “If the generosity of the space and its volumes are optimised, that’s true luxury, irrespective of finishes.”
Alongside a love of “honest materials”, all these architect-and-designer-inspired solutions share highly-considered layouts. That’s more easily done in former warehouses and in the countryside. But what of pokier places? An inaugural design competition is focusing the minds of architects on the future of more modest live-work spaces. One scheme shortlisted for the Davidson Prize sets its sights on the balcony. The team, Outsideln, proposes this outside space could be adapted to house domestic workspaces. They imagine an area that can be cordoned off, when needed. Even though their solution is for new urban properties, its sliding external doors, internal partitions and curtains would make those pioneering creatives feel at home.
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