Eileen Gray was a turn-of-the-twentieth century Modernist architect. Her view was that the way we live our lives should influence the design and layout of our homes, not vice versa.
These illustrations show Eileen Gray’s house E-1027. She imagined a person’s movement through the house and allowed this pattern to shape its layout. Spaces depicted in the original two dimensional drawing such as a warm place to catch the sun come to life in the architecture of the building.
The interior design of the house also reflected her views and made it a place where the everyday became joyful and pleasurable. Stairs became sculptural, cupboards were labelled and carefully placed to receive items such as hats, coats, utensils, while textures made the house sensual.
Her thinking – her “choreography of the everyday” – provides us with a blueprint for the work we do. We believe that our design should give you both what you need and what you desire from your home. By doing this we can enable you to live your life the way you want to live it.
How does this thinking work in the context of a home extension?
Before we put pen to paper on designing a project, we like to understand several things:
- How do you use your space at the moment? We ask you to undertake a seven day exercise, thinking about the way you move round your home and how each of the rooms makes you feel.
- What do you want from your new space? There are the practicalities (the needs), of course. Another bedroom, a home office, a kitchen. But there are also the desires. Do you want somewhere to relax in a pool of sunlight with a cup of coffee? Do you want a space where you can entertain friends and spend time as a family? A kitchen where you can cook and have your children in the same space?
Once we have your needs and desires we can understand what you’re really looking for and can start to draw out the design of your project. Understanding the choreography of your everyday can make your new space everything you imagined and more. Your extension becomes so much more than some bolted-on space.
Most of us live in existing housing stock, which was often built decades if not centuries ago. Your house and the way it functions may have made perfect sense for the time it was built. But we don’t live in that way now. By using Eileen Gray’s thinking, we can reinterpret your space and give you what you really want from your home. Her choreography of the everyday makes your everyday into something so much more desirable.
