RoominaRoom is a practical solution to a client’s need for additional living space within a large existing room; it is also an innovative and imaginative new insertion, highly practical yet celebrating the form and possibilities of timber.

It houses a raised double bed and desk space, bookshelves and storage cupboards, all with access from a curved, open tread staircase. The structure is a series of curved timber ribs, similar in function to a ship’s hull; they give RoominaRoom an organic sculptural quality and their complex articulated curves convey a sense of painstaking craftsmanship, yet were designed with contemporary digital technology and produced with CNC-cutting equipment.

Alex Haw of Atmos was asked to advise the client, a couple who needed to gain more space but couldn’t expand upward or outwards, so had to expand inwards as they needed more space for their growing family of two young children. Their apartment, in an unprepossessing 1980s development, had one great asset, a large 5 x 6 metre living room on the ground floor with a 3.5 metre high ceiling – originally designed to give the impression of a retro-fitted industrial loft space.

Yet the 3.5 metre height was insufficient to create a whole new floor and existing windows compromised any possibility of a mezzanine gallery along one side. Alex Haw’s solution to the problem was RoominaRoom; it fits into the existing interior space like an elegant piece of timber furniture yet maintains the sense of spaciousness in the interior as a whole.

As he explains:

“The room compacts a series of planes and pockets that carefully combine minimal volume with maximum functionality and expression. Barely shoulder-width at its exposed elevation, it offers a rich, sensual, multi-programmed journey from door to bed. The thin structural enwrapping plywood ribs swell and retract as needed to provide integrated furniture, doubling as shelf, bed or desk supports, meting out a cinematic rhythm on the short but highly articulated journey through the space.

The outer skin is sheathed in plasterboard that blends seamlessly back into the existing room. The steps offer fluidly curving plywood floorboards that trace the journey, slowly eroding towards the inaccessible rear of the step into a carved contoured topography that eventually melts away as a hole to reveal the steps below.”