Inside Out House
Inside out house is a celebration of intelligent, crafted design. It is a doll’s house designed to highlight issues affecting disabled children, including inside/outside play and tactile learning.
Inside Out House is conceived as two distinct elements. Firstly, it is a concrete house with a bonsai tree and a moss/herb garden, which is to be kept outdoors. Secondly, it is a series of individual oak rooms, hollowed out and painted in bright colours, which can be inserted into the sturdy shell structure. Children can play outdoors with the whole house, or simply the concrete shell, removing, inserting and balancing the oak rooms on or in the concrete house. They can also bring the different oak rooms indoors for continued imaginative play.
Coffey Architects’ architecture is well-made, robust, tactile and colourful. It is crafted from noble materials that will get better with age. Inside Out House is no exception. This is not a toy to be forgotten. It has a permanent place outside, a sculptural form that lives with the family throughout the year and offers different ways of playing, dependent on the changing seasons
Beautifully made, robust, tactile and colourful, the Inside Out House was described by a Telegraph newspaper review as ‘A piece that we can imagine a child getting years of play from… A great example of the classic modernist principle of “bringing the outside in’.
