Gallery: Moving Walls Transform a Tiny Apartment Into a 5-Room Home
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Instead of following the typical studio apartment floor plan and outfitting Pila's place with a galley kitchen, closet-sized bathroom, and a bedroom the size of a prison cell, PKMN developed a solution that allowed her to have several spacious rooms—just not all at once.
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A series of rolling storage units double as walls.
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Industrial tracks, typically used to support rolling bookshelves at libraries are given new life in this atypical application.
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The itinerant nature of the walls means each of these spaces can be larger, about 160 square feet, than if they were permanently defined.
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Special features, like a hidden Murphy Bed, are built into the boxes.
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Or a fold out prep table for the kitchen module.
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Each unit offers approximately 150 cubic feet of storage space for Pila to store her possessions.
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Each unit weighs nearly a ton when fully loaded, but they can be moved with a modicum of effort.
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"The project is about how to allow the coexistence of both configurations, private life and work place, without renouncing spacious pieces for each use," says PKMN Architecture co-founder and designer Carmelo Rodríguez.
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Privacy screens can maneuvered to act as a shield against prying eyes.
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Pila's home doubles as an office and the space can be used to host clients.
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Half of the house is open space that allows Pila to have some more permanent possessions.
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"We like very much the use of this kind of tiling because of the result of combining abstract patterns that become figurative in its mosaic repetition, introducing a natural/landscaped ambience into the house."
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The bathroom is small, but turns into a luxurious dressing area in the right configuration.
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The exterior of her house is traditional, but the internals are thoroughly modern.
