Pole Position
Words by Simon Pound
Photography Emily Andrews
Architectural designers glamuzina paterson convert a factory into a Batchelor pad, complete with fireman’s pole.
The first thing you notice is the fireman’s pole. There is no way around it – it isn’t every house that has one. Not even every superhero lair has one. Though in some ways, that’s what this apartment is: a hidden, secure, fantasy hideaway that every boy of any age can relate to.
The brief was simple: owner Nigel Shanks wanted to turn an empty warehouse portion of his commercial building into an apartment that was cool, simple, liveable and modern, but with one big catch – it could be reverted back into commercial property once he no longer wanted to live there.
For the designer, Shanks chose a tenant from one of his buildings, a tenant who he also happened to have known from school. So it was that Dominic Glamuzina and design partner Aaron Paterson of Glamuzina Paterson found themselves working on a project for their landlord.
The space had been used as a factory making sauces for burgers, and the last inhabitant had been a massive aioli vat. It was a ’50s-era standard warehouse with breeze blocks, concrete floor, a nice high roof, simple windows and some ugly bi-fold doors that had been added later. Photos from before the fit-out show the magnitude of what that simple request actually meant.
Warehouses have no insulation, they have exposed wires, they don’t have mezzanine floors, and they certainly don’t have fireman’s poles. We’ll come back to the pole later, much as the eye does when in the house, as there are other factors that make this house feel like a lair, a hidden getaway, a place separate from the outside world.
There were other design particulars – Shanks likes to travel and therefore likes the house to be secure; he also likes his privacy. To bring this about, Glamuzina Paterson removed the bi-fold doors and replaced them with a breeze block wall – keeping with the unpretentious and workmanlike materials. The effect of the high closed walls and windows situated above human height is to make you feel underground, and removed from the world. But thanks to the use of light and space the apartment manages to feel at once underground and also, quite counter-intuitively, like a loft.
The light and shape use that make this so are the two stand-out features for the designers. A design ethic for the firm is to try to create unexpected moments in a house. In this project, it manages this with light. Skylights create a rectangular flow from kitchen to fireman pole, leading the eye down the room and acting as a kind of light carpet for people entering. The pole hatch creates an oval-ish circle that disappears in on itself as it concludes.
And in perhaps the writer’s favourite feature, a storage solution doubles as a lightbox. The storage lightbox keeps with another theme of the design – taking existing features and making them work. So for the lightbox, the architects used a material in keeping with the pared-back vaguely industrial feel – a fibrelite corrugated opaque sheet. This was put up as a wall in front of the triangular storage space – a space that has ample skylighting, making the background much lighter than the foreground, allowing it to ‘shine’. During the day this triangle gives a clean even light, and at night it radiates with found external light.
Skylighting also gives the bathroom a sense of space it might not otherwise have achieved – being an enclosed windowless space at the back left of the floorplan, this simple touch again helps lift the building from the feeling of a basement.
But if you had to pick the one feature, you’d come back to the pole. Shanks was keen to add the playful touch to the house, but it turns out it isn’t that easy to find one. Glamuzina researched far and wide and ended up abandoning the search for a brass relic from a station in favour of stainless steel. It still came in as one of the pricier elements of the design. It is a fun touch, though it brings more to the apartment than just novelty. If you stand back and look towards the entrance you see the line of the fireman’s pole is echoed by the pole that supports the mezzanine floor.
This is emblematic of the design: found and chosen features work together in clever and surprising ways. The end effect is almost like an Escher picture, where the perspective becomes impossible as one pole holds and the other mirrors, yet plays against the balance by disappearing up the hatch to the bedroom suspended above.
And in that image you have the apartment: practical, playful, clever and a bit of a hidden secret. u
Subscribe to the latest design news delivered directly to your inbox every month...