Designed and built by hand with friends
Turned a dusty storage attic into a 25 m² workspace for learning, building and working through the night
- The idea: a room that keeps you working. On the walls are the timelines of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs and Walt Disney. Their failures and dead ends are written in black marker. Their biggest wins are painted in fluorescent paint, so they only light up at night, when you are still at work. Above it all is the line “Those obsessive enough to work till dawn once change the world.”
- Starting point: an attic used for storage, with bare boards, a plywood floor, a layer of dust and a single lightbulb
- Rebuilt it by hand: cleaned and painted the walls, laid the floor, and installed new wiring and lighting
- Planned for a tight space: the ceiling slopes from 180 cm at the ridge to 75 cm at the walls, so I drew a dimensioned plan with only low furniture, to keep the room open and bright
- Four zones:
- Brainstorm: a 2.5 m glass board you can draw on from both sides. It divides the room without closing it off, with floor mats beside it for thinking at the board.
- Work: a 2.5 m desk for two.
- Lecture and film lounge: mats, a coffee table, a projector and a pull-down screen.
- Library: a bookcase, bean bags and storage boxes.
- The hard part, the glass board: no company would install a sheet that large through the narrow attic hatch. We used two window glass units in a frame we made ourselves.
- Made the stencils for all 4 timelines: a month of work in Figma and Corel, laid out to the millimetre for printing, cutting and mounting