Project: Loft Bezares
Architects: Taller ADG
Location: Mexico City, Mexico
Area: 653 sq mt
Project Year 2017
Photographer: Onnis Luque
Taller ADG in collaboration with Micaela de Bernardi in charge of interior design and furniture selection
INSPIRATION:
Architectural design in a single gallery. The guiding design priority is family life, the main living room and dining areas are very large, and the staircase was used to provide a family room that links the master bedroom with the kids bedrooms, the ground floor with the mezzanine, becoming a shared space that acts as the heart of the private area of the residence. There mezzanine provides space for two additional bedrooms.
UNIQUE PROPERTIES / LOFT BEZARES DESCRIPTION:
Family home developed across a whole story in a former industrial lab building, under the loft typology. The residence had a mezzanine added in, taking advantage of the ceiling heights to accommodate additional space for bedrooms. The project’s distinguishing feature is its family room staircase, meaning the stairs and landing that make up a living room with a home theatre, reading and resting spaces. The apartment also has also an outdoor space, which was treated as a patio.
OPERATION / FLOW / INTERACTION:
Entering the apartment, one reaches a double-height area with dining and living room. From the main common area a tunnel leads to the private section, with an office. This office space leads, in turn, to the bedrooms and has access to the family room staircase, where an arrangement of stairs and landings create a unique area that functions as a projection room. Master Bedroom can be accessed through the office space. The family room staircase also leads to the mezzanine with kids bedrooms.
PRODUCTION / REALIZATION TECHNOLOGY:
Concrete and wood were chosen because of its durability and purity, besides the taste and emotive attachment that the architect developed toward these strong and symbolic elements. The wood ceiling is not an aesthetic caprice; it is a series of systems that play a particular roll. First, closer to the ceiling are electrical and fire pipes hidden by the wide beams, then on a second layer is the indirect lighting hidden on a set of wood lattice, and the third layer are shutters giving a uniformity and cleanness to the overall complexity of systems.
RESEARCH ABSTRACT:
Being this space a former industrial warehouse, our research was mainly based in the existing materiality and textures. While working with such strong materials, came to our attention that they work in aesthetical terms. There is something raw and pure in mixing a whitened oak floor and exposing the smooth and gray concrete in walls and other surfaces for instance.
CHALLENGE:
Our main challenge was to accommodate the desire program into such a small floorplate. Our solution was to take advantage of the height of the space to create a mezzanine and linking it in a very unique and efficient way designing a staircase family room.
