"Come Home"

This past summer I worked in an interior design company that mostly focuses on designing the interior of residential houses and I really enjoyed that! When I started thinking about the Honours project and looking around at the potential sites, I decided that I wanted to choose something that is very particular to England and very different to anything I am used to seeing where I come from. The English terraced houses were something very unusual for me when I first came to England. I was shocked when I saw a whole street of identical houses side by side one another without any gaps between them! I was also intrigued that these houses were built in the 19th Century, during the reign of Queen Victorian and are still lived in today.



Photo I took when I first came to England to send my parents to show them terraced houses.

 

My initial idea was to use about 4 or 5 of these attached houses, and combine them into one space, a shop. From the outside there will still be 4 doors, the customer can enter from any one of them, and on the inside the space will be completely changed with connecting paths and bridges linking the 4 houses into one space with showrooms. The shop will be a furniture shop, where there will be show rooms recreating different parts of residential houses. There won’t need to be a lot of storage as the products would be ordered from catalogues. The aim of this is for average people who would like to make their homes to be beautifully designed, to show that it’s not out of reach for ordinary people.  I was thinking the name of it would be ‘Come Home’.

 

This reflects the theme 'time and memory' as the home is a place where people spend so much of their lives in, and witness all the changes: babies are born, grow up, have their own families. As these houses are around 100 years old, several generations have passed through them. The houses themselves tell the tale of lives that have gone on within them, the changes that the people who lived in them have done. As we live in the 21st century, we don't have to live in the past of these houses, just as changes have undergone already they can continue happening. The aim of my project is to :

• show people just how much can be done with the interiors of these houses to suit our modern lives
• to encourage reinvention of the interiors of these houses instead of building new ones
• to show the transitions of the past in these houses
• to surprise visitors - as they see the exterior they expect the interior to be a certain way because thatis what they are used to and associate with, but this does not have to be that way.

The outer shell remains the same, but the interior is changing.

 

Initial drawing to suggest the project proposal.