Continuity and Connection – Wabi-Sabi Apartment by Together Design Studio
Together Design Studio’s alterations of Wabi-Sabi Apartment, an existing apartment in a small building in Randwick on Bidjigal and Gadigal Country, highlight both change and continuity. Through a focus on privacy and simplicity, a home is created. Yet more than providing a serene canvas for the lives of those who inhabit its spaces, the project elucidates the duality between what is cut and what is continuous through the process of renovation, as notions of living change over time.
Attention is given to continuity here through the use of natural materials, textures and the preservation of certain elements of the building. At the same time, cuts in this continuity highlight the duality between existing and new notions of living, which are neither fixed nor simply one nor the other. New and old, raw and refined, polished and rough – these are always at play, yet in different intensities at different times, layered and not. These intensities are always, at moments, cuts in continuity and continuity in cuts, and this plays out in numerous ways in Together Design Studio’s alterations.
A solid four-storey brick walk-up apartment building houses this apartment, its two bedrooms, bathroom and inset balcony, which are entered through the living room and linked by a central corridor. This is established as an existing continuity. The alterations cut these existing conditions, giving the work a new, transformed and distinct continuity; it now exists as something else. Two former kitchen walls are cut out, making two rooms one with added structural steel. This creates a continuity between what was once two rooms and a transfer of the already continuous structure. The corridor had a door; this has also been cut out but left as an opening, making the passage now part of the living room as well. The bathroom basin was moved to where the shower once was, making fewer fixtures and more space between them.
These cuts to the existing continuity are also cuts in the spatial layout of living incorporated into the existing apartment. Kitchens today have fewer walls around them, like in these alterations. Living room life is now more seamless with kitchen life, which the alterations support and enable. The kitchen sink is no longer near a window where it once was; instead, it moves as close to the middle of the living room as it does here. At the same time, the kitchen bench becomes deeper, and there are fewer overhead cupboards; the couch and kitchen sink can be much closer now. The kitchen is no longer cut off from a living room in this new notion of living.
However, existing things, with their own continuity, resist being cut and reincorporated into a new continuity. This is where Together Design Studio has focused significant attention. Curtains (bathroom and bedroom) and mirrors (bedroom and living) curate a consistency across various rooms. Walls and ceilings of white-blues and blues, ceramic gloss tiles in blue-grey, benches of blue-grey Grigio Argente granite and cupboard fronts finished in green-blue establish associations of similarity – primarily through the tone of blue, which has a simple and muted consistency in this work. The layered oak timber boards, timber handles and wooden furniture, including Thonet No. B9 and No. 18, then interrupt this consistency – not like the cuts to the existing spatial layout, but as cuts within the new continuity created by Together Design Studio.
If everything is transient, and anything can be cut, how does a designer know what to cut and leave continuous? Together Design Studio has given one answer to this question through these alterations, altering the experience of living in these spaces quite profoundly from what it was before by establishing a new continuity: Something quite distinct from discussion of balance, harmony and contrast.