Redchurch Street, Tower Hamlets district, London. With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, local slums fill with soiledworkshops and crowded factories. By the end of the XIX century, the furniture manufacturing industry becomes the leading sector in the area: from the making of wardrobes, cabinets and chairs up to French polishing.
Today, the Redchurch Street area is exceptionally dynamic, characterised by a rich cultural and commercial variety. The problematic past in the sign of production left many industrial look buildings: small 3 to 4 storeys geometric blocks with a courtyard and a red bricks facade, signature of the Victorian era. Creative sectors of every kind take over at a commercial level, filling the streets withshowcases and causing the growth of the demand of local affordable residential solutions suitable for a mixed-use, which cancombine the house space with the work one.
It is following this need and the request to create a setting having a bond with the quarter history and character that the project Showroom life was born. A compact, multifunctional, flexible, innovative and elegant studio flat, where the red brick combines with metal frames, polished concrete and luminist (a light blue luminescent stone) to recreate that industrial-retail mood typical of a modern furnishing showroom set up within the walls of an old factory.
Glass doors and walls separate the different areas of the open space, while a plexiglass folding table acts as a window for the bed underneath it. A big interactive screen allows the lodger, who works in the design industry, to rediscover the physical dimension of the drawing gesture.