Julien Pradignac, the founder of Atelier PA, was asked to design a hotel-style apartment in this small, poorly lit, street-level space. He began by opening up the original layout of the apartment to create a single open space for working, living, and sleeping, along with a separate bathroom. A “service area” was created with a small entrance hall, and it includes room for a washing machine, as well as a minimalist bathroom in waxed concrete with a small sink, toilet, and large shower. Working along the length of the very small apartment, Pradignac created storage space above the apartment’s installations to free up as much floor space as possible. This allowed him to also create a long, custom-made unit that serves as a kitchen, worktop, and even a small impromptu home office—with a cabinet front that doubles as a desktop when propped into place. There’s also a drawer that doubles as an ironing board.
Previously, a mezzanine level broke up the volume with its beautiful high ceiling, making the space feel smaller. An ingenious pulley system, however, created more space by allowing the apartment’s bed to be raised to the ceiling when no one is using it. This changes the use of the space allowing the owner to keep a sofa in the room, thanks to wooden stops in the wall (higher than the sofa) on which the bed rests when it is lowered. The tedious task of moving a bed or setting up and then breaking down a sofa bed twice a day has been eliminated. “The inspiration came from laundry lines that can be easily moved into place when they are being used and then just as easily put away. It allowed us to think about the bed from a technical standpoint. But we were also inspired by the iconic fishing nets used in the estuaries of France’s Loire, Charente, and Gironde rivers with their pulley systems.” From this deceptively simple brief, the bed becomes an attractive feature of the unit, thanks in part to the playful aspect of how it is operated, but also because of the way it discreetly disappears. In keeping with the small space, the problem of storage is solved by the large kitchen unit and the cupboards that extend up to the ceiling on the entrance and bathroom sides. The approach here is simple—no clutter is allowed.