Room By Room
There are now so many architect designed apartments at the newly redeveloped BBC Television Centre that it’s a wonder there are any left undone for the rest of us to have a go at. Designers include Suzy Hoodless, Bella Freud, Laura Fulmine and now The Waldo Works. This, like the others, is on the market with The Modern House for R7,600,000 (I know but hang on…) and is the only four bedroom apartment.
Now I thought the Bella Freud one was expensive and, I’ll admit, I didn’t look at the price of this one when deciding to include it – it’s Friday Fantasy after all, but there is actually a good reason for including these high end designer pads and that’s because you can get of sense of which interiors trends and ideas they think will stick given their, presumably fairly unlimited budget. So for that reason alone (and assuming Elton John isn’t reading while house hunting over his morning coffee) we shall have a look around.
It’s arranged over two floors with the bedrooms on the seventh and the living above. The master suite is massive and runs the whole length with a huge bathroom and dressing room, there is a second en suite bedroom and two more bedrooms each with their own bathroom opposite. Upstairs it’s all about this huge, curved open plan living space with a library, media room and office all leading off it.
First thing to note – the colours. Everyone has been talking about pink and green for ages and here those two core shades have been intensified to forest and rust. A sign of things to come? The black box in the middle hides the cloakroom and plant room (I remember writing one of my first property features and marveling that the owners had a specific room for plans much like Aaron Spelling’s wrapping room… anyway space for the boiler for the rest of us). The black helps to punctuate the space as well as literally dividing it up as well as echoing the dark window frames. Note also how the legs of the chairs are similar to the coffee table legs at the far end. So the space is broken up but still still linked by colour and shape.
Now I do like this arrangement above. The two marble-lined alcoves – one for the kitchen and one for the bar and the black island makes that kitchen rather minimal as it blends into the wall behind. The bar stool echo the chairs and it looks like both are velvet. Now admittedly most of us won’t have the space to create a box in the middle of our living space to do the same thing but somethings it’s about sparking an idea. For example – that kitchen alcove is the same width as a standard cupboard – 60cm so you could do that in a standard kitchen and create storage cupboards all around. You could replace the marble with an internal window if you wanted to see into the room behind…