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  • My name is Jeroen Kluidmans, I'm an architect at Here5 Architects in Amsterdam.

  • My name is Jeroen Otveldt, I'm an architect and partner at Here5.

  • We're here in the north of Amsterdam in an area called Buikloterham.

  • It used to be an old industrial area but now it's being transformed into a residential site.

  • The apartment was delivered in 2016 and is part of a bigger block.

  • We designed the rest of the block as well.

  • And we designed this apartment as a range of three apartments for the owner who lives there with three generations.

  • His mom, himself and this apartment is going to be for his daughter.

  • The apartment is 45 square meters.

  • It was a single-sided apartment and on the front side of the apartment we have functions like cooking and dining where you have the most light and as more as you get back into the apartment the more private functions are like the sleeping room and the bathroom.

  • The apartment is 3.2 meters in height so that gives us the opportunity to design a really efficient way of sleeping on top of these functions which opened up the rest of the room for the main living.

  • In our office we always like to work with other disciplines, with furniture designers, with product designers and in our network we had Paul Timmer which is also a friend of us and together we worked further on the design.

  • The single unit consists of the bedroom, bathroom and some storage inside but it's a piece of as tiles of the plywood on the outside goes all the way around.

  • We choose the plywood material for its color and texture.

  • It's nice and light, durable and it gives a good warm feeling to the apartment.

  • The living space is on a platform and in the platform there's some extra storage for a mattress for guests.

  • The staircase is designed so that exactly three steps go into one tile and make it very airy to have some space underneath like it's almost not there.

  • If you go up the stairs you enter the sleeping space.

  • There's space for quite a big two-person mattress.

  • There's still a lot of space left and right from you to leave your books, your laptop.

  • So to make it more furniture like we edged off all the corners to make it like something really special standing out in the middle which makes it easier to pass and not such a hard corner.

  • In the kitchen we used with the same diamond edge corner as in the rest of the unit but it's flipped over like it's almost freestanding, floating.

  • For a small apartment like this we do have a big kitchen completely equipped with all furniture and all electrics.

  • The kitchen has a fridge, it has an oven, a cooking plate and ventilation above it.

  • This apartment is designed for a young woman and therefore we have a lot of storage space in the back of the apartment.

  • The bathroom is quite hidden in into the unit because the door is from the same material and in the same surface as the other panels.

  • The bathroom has a simple clean white tiles with a gray floor tiling.

  • That fits in with the rest of the apartment.

  • So underneath the bed behind the kitchen there's a pretty big storage space where the washing machine is and where all the other stuff can be stored.

  • In the future the pressure on the city is getting stronger which means that all the apartments are getting smaller and smaller.

  • This product of a small apartment is getting more common.

  • I think if you make something special out of it, something personal, then it can really become a good design.

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