2013 BOY Winner: Small Apartment

There’s very little room for anything in a minuscule 387 square feet, but Alan Chu made space for architecture. In the apartment of a recently divorced businessman, Chu’s main intervention was to design blackened-steel spiral stairs for access to the sleeping loft. On the concrete-floored main level, he clad the walls in running-bond white-glazed ceramic tiles. One of those walls became the backdrop for a series of pine “crates” containing the kitchen at one end and an entertainment center at the other. He autoclaved the pine for both durability and aesthetics.

Suggesting the transience of this home for its owner, in his time of bachelor improvisation and reorganization, the crate motif reappears as the enclosure for the top landing of the spiral stairs. Storage for clothing is a closet, not a crate. The sleeping loft’s most graphic statement is a Konstantin Grcic chair with a seat in white powder-coated triangles, sitting against the black-painted feature wall. 

Project Team:
Anita Meduna (project manager).