THE INNER WEST SYDNEY CHALLENGE OF SPACE
Designing or problem solving?
Vast majority of our design work is actually problem-solving. That is why I love it so much.
INSIDESIGN is based in Balmain and majority of our clients are in Sydney's Inner West. And for the Inner West Sydney homes, the most common problem to solve is: SPACE.
1. The terrace house staircases
Terrace houses have an unused space below staircase and the challenge is how to use that space efficiently.
Sometimes it ends up being a little powder room, sometimes a (banquette) seating, but most often it turns out to be storage of one kind or another.
2. The need for an extra room without adding a room
This is a very common space problem in Balmain: client needs to introduce extra room functions without adding an extra room.
The most typical cases would be needing a home office or guest room, or separating children to their own rooms. Sometimes this can be done with just clever joinery (and in fact we talk about this a lot with my office buddy Jennifer Crawford, who's an architect at Our New Home Coach and who has the same attitude to design as I do – hopefully we'll get to do a blog post about this together later on). Sometimes you don't need to build an additional room or extension to the house to be able to fit in all functions. Spending $30.000 on joinery is much cheaper than spending $700.000 on house extension and without the headache of a DA!
I have designed lots of wall beds, because of their practicality and when they are truly custom-made you can specify the storage around the bed exactly as needed. Off-the-shelf wallbeds look quite average and are limited in options, so I would always have it custom-made.
3. The empty room
The room where nobody ever goes to can be a good problem to have. It means the client has additional space and we can re-think the room layout and functionality from scratch, based on their family and lifestyle.
Often this room is in the attic and we have created fantastic office / guest room / teenager retreats in the attic. Sometimes it's a large attic that can be divided to multiple rooms. Or it is the formal dining room too far from the kitchen, only used at Christmas time, yet the family would need a second living room instead.
Talk to us about your space problem.
We'd love to solve it for you.