Blushing Pink / Emerald Green
Sydney, Australia: Who knew colour could be structural? This unexpected, playful 34 sq metre studio apartment in Sydney’s inner city Surry Hills, evolved through the designer’s distinct approach to design and has been transformed into a light filled living space: living/dining area, bathroom, bedroom and effectively a ‘huge pantry that you cook in, rather than a very tiny kitchen’ as the designer calls it - all now carefully resolved and vibrantly realised with the use of blushing pink carpet and a foam green bathroom.
The apartment is the work of Sarah Jamieson, Director of design studio Catseye Bay who approached the brief through her open-ended, exploratory art-based design process. Ms Jamieson worked over a period of time in the space, allowing the studio apartment’s possibilities to unfold, and evolve, before taking those ideas through modeling and detail design stages. The result is delicious: beautiful, playful, strong and joyous, an antidote to the standard white-and-neutral solution designed to make small spaces look larger.
This is a design that was shaped by colour. Sarah was drawn first to the incredible light in the apartment – the front facade is 60% windows, so there was beautiful light, bouncing into the space. However, over time it was not this direct light that interested her. Working in the space, she discovered that around 2 or 3pm on a sunny day, the light bounced off the vibrant stripes on the building opposite, (a work by indigenous Australian artist Rekko Rennie Always is always will be, now ironically no longer there), and the apartment was flooded with sublime pink and blue reflected light. This began to unfold nuanced ways of working with the space that were beyond the obvious and physical. “So, for example, the pink floor plane is more than simply a use of colour: it responds to the reflected light, and starts to create a particular shape, and then the joinery starts to play with that and work into that.. so you could say the colour is structural”, Jamieson says.
