Designer Keiji Ashizawa used muted tones to make the most of the sunlight in this apartment in central Tokyo, which features wooden art pieces and furniture that was specially designed for the space.
For the Hiroo Residence, named after its location in the city’s Hiroo neighbourhood, Ashizawa wanted to underline the quality of the light in the flat.
A cut-out wall lets light into the hallway, which has an artwork by Sara Martinsen
In the open-plan kitchen and living room, light streams in from a balcony, and the designer took advantage of this light source by creating a cut-out wall so that the light carries through to the hallway next to it.
“I think you can see we have a very nice sunlight here,” he told Dezeen during a walkthrough of the apartment. “So I didn’t want to use white, as it would be too bright – instead I used muted, subtle tones.”
A wooden artwork by Atelier Plateau and a slatted sideboard decorate the living room
He also wanted Hiroo Residence to feel like a peaceful place to come home to in a busy city, using natural materials to create a calm ambience.
“Outside it’s super noisy but inside it’s very quiet, so I chose muted tones that also fuse with the materials; the wood and the stone,” Ashizawa said.
The tranquil 200-square-metre apartment, which overlooks the Arisugawanomiya Memorial Park, has three bedrooms and two bathrooms, as well as a kitchen and dining area, a small workspace and plenty of storage spaces.
Shaker-informed chairs and a wooden light were used for the kitchen
Before designing the interior, Ashizawa changed the layout of the flat to make it more open, taking out an existing hallway to create a bigger dining space.
“Our goal was to design a space that can only be created by meticulously crafting from the smallest detail to the furniture, resulting in a quiet, comforting, and inspiring atmosphere with little noise, surrounded by natural materials crafted with tactility,” Ashizawa said of the design.
Keiji Ashizawa used a neutral colour palette for the home
He worked with the Japanese wooden furniture company Karimoku on the project, which is the eighth in its Karimoku Case Study series that sees it collaborate with architects on bespoke furniture and interior projects.
As a result, wood was used throughout Hiroo Residence, with white-stained oak covering many of the floors.
Ashizawa also worked with Karimoku to create wooden window frames and sliding doors, which were placed throughout the flat to add privacy without taking up too much space.
The furniture matches the wooden interior details and includes two pieces created especially for the project – a sideboard with decorative wooden slats and a dining chair with a woven seat that was inspired by both Shaker designs and classic Scandinavian chairs.
Wooden panels cover the bedroom walls
In the bedroom of Hiroo Residence, wooden wall panels add a tactile and more natural feel, which is echoed in the built-in shelves and drawers in the en-suite walk-in closet.
Cabinets were also used to hide different functions in the kitchen, where a large wooden unit takes up an entire wall.
An entire wall is taken up by a wooden kitchen unit
Even smaller details in the flat, such as the long kitchen lamp, were made from the material.
Artworks in wood by Danish art studio Atelier Plateau and the artist Sara Martinsen, which were created especially for the space, decorate the walls.
Karimoku has worked with Ashizawa on a number of projects, including its second showroom which just opened in Kyoto, Japan, and the Azabu Residence Case Study, where the designer referenced mid-century American design.
Bespoke furniture with a mid-century feel can be rearranged to alter the use of this office space in north London, which interior design studio The Mint List has created for a music management company.
Camilla Kelly of The Mint List designed the headquarters for management company Everybody’s, which recently upgraded to larger premises on the ground floor of a former shipping depot.
Everybody’s office is located in a former shipping depot
Architect Duncan Woodburn developed plans to reconfigure the large, light-filled unit as an open-plan workspace including a high-ceilinged entrance along with a kitchen and dining area.
For the interior scheme, Kelly worked closely with Lucy Tudhope of Everybody’s, ensuring the focus was on retaining the building’s existing character and creating a flexible workspace with a midcentury feel.
The Mint List designed custom joinery to divvy up the interior
“We wanted to ensure that we respected the modernist nature of this industrial site, whilst integrating a sense of creativity that was absolutely key for the client,” Kelly said.
One of the main challenges was zoning the large space to create different functional areas. This was achieved using custom-built joinery to separate self-contained yet open-plan spaces.
Modular furniture features throughout the office interior
Much of the joinery is modular, allowing the space to be reconfigured if required. Large storage units at the entrance are accessible from both sides and completely movable so they can be rolled away to create an open event space.
Most of the time, the units serve to separate the office from the entrance area and provide staff with a degree of privacy from visitors.
The office also houses a lounge for playing music
The main workspace is flooded with light that enters through the building’s glazed frontage. It contains desks and bespoke oak credenzas that can also be easily moved to completely clear the open-plan room.
At one end of the office is a kitchen with built-in storage, including coloured drawers and cupboard fronts that complement the African sapele wood joinery.
The kitchen contains bar seating next to the windows and a dining space arranged around a three-metre-long leather-topped artist’s table.
A full-height glazed wall specified by the client separates the workspace from private offices and a cloakroom on the ground floor, as well as a mezzanine that houses an acoustically sealed meeting room and a lounge for playing music.
Glossy tiles feature in the stairwell
“The brief was a seamless, vertical grid of glass,” explained Kelly. “So we helped to translate that in terms of the finishes – textured glass to obscure vision through to the office and a beautifully finished oak frame that complements the midcentury scheme.”
Throughout the project, The Mint List applied a palette of tactile and honest materials including sapele wood, oak, concrete and burnished brass.
The Mint List added wood surfaces and brass details
A colour scheme based on natural hues including greens, creams and earthy browns adds visual richness to the spaces.
The office’s Marmoleum flooring is a custom design that subtly separates the space into different zones. The renewable material was chosen for its excellent acoustic properties in order to help absorb sound within the open spaces.
The bathrooms are playfully decorated with colourful tiles
Bathrooms located on the ground floor feature retro sanitary- and brassware complemented by playful tiles, with each wall laid in different patterns and colours.
Other recent office makeovers in London include Office S&M’s self-designed studio inside a former paint-making workshop and creative agency Ask Us For Ideas’ Soho office, which is split across two diametrically opposed floors.
Architecture firm BIG has constructed a mass-timber Passivhaus factory in a Norwegian forest for outdoor furniture maker Vestre, which features a green roof and solar panels as well as an exterior slide.
Instead of being hidden away on an industrial estate, The Plus factory development is nestled in 300 acres of woodland near the village of Magnor on the Swedish border.
The cross-shaped building consists of four double-height wings, each housing a different stage of Vestre‘s production process and radiating out from a central office area with an internal courtyard at its heart.
The Plus factory has a distinctive cross shape
Constructed in just 18 months, the 7,000-square-metre factory is made mostly from wood and stores 1,400 tons of carbon dioxide in its structure made of PEFC-certified cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glued-laminated timber (glulam), Vestre said.
The building combines energy-efficient Passivhaus strategies with a streamlined, robot-assisted production line, which according to Vestre reduces its energy consumption by 90 per cent compared to a conventional factory.
Its energy and heating demands will be partly met with the help of 900 rooftop solar panels, 17 geothermal wells and heat pumps hidden behind the walls to capture excess heat from the production process.
The factory is nestled into a forest on Norway’s border with Sweden
Taken together, Vestre says this makes The Plus the “world’s most environmentally-friendly furniture factory”, generating 55 per cent lower emissions from energy and materials than a comparable building.
The company claims this also makes the project “Paris-proof”, bringing it in line with global targets set out in the Paris Agreement to halve emissions by 2030.
However, this assessment does not account for emissions generated during the building’s whole lifecycle including those related to Vestre’s production process.
Overall, The Plus falls short of achieving net-zero emissions, which every building both old and new would have to reach by 2050 to help limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in accordance with the Paris Agreement.
Its exterior is clad in charred larch
Instead, the project is reportedly on track to become the first industrial building in the Nordic countries to reach the highest rating in the BREEAM environmental certification scheme, which is only awarded to the top one per cent of projects.
“There are no industrial buildings that have even come close to the highest standard, not even the second-highest,” BIG design lead Viktoria Millentrup told Dezeen. “So BREEAM-wise, there was not even an example building we could follow.”
“It’s untraditional for a factory to focus so much on sustainability,” agreed lead architect David Zahle. “For a lot of companies, production is about keeping costs low and hiding it away.”
Exterior stairs allow the public to access the roof and look into the factory
In comparison, the interior of The Plus is laid bare by huge windows running up its charred-larch facade and by the glazed courtyard punctuating its centre, both of which are accessible to the public using huge exterior staircases.
In this way, Vestre says The Plus is meant to bring ideas about more sustainable building and production methods to the general public and “build a bridge between the Greta Thunberg generation and industrialists”.
“The project is very transparent, almost open-source both in terms of how the products are made but also in how we’ve opened up the facade to bring people closer,” Zahle said.
“You invite people to play and you invite people to walk up on the roof and you create a park around it so that even a factory can become part of creating a good life.”
A yellow spiral staircase leads from the roof into an internal courtyard
Each of the Plus’s four wings is topped with green roofs grown from seeds that were collected from the surrounding forest and solar panels that together will produce 250,000 kilowatt-hours of renewable energy a year.
Underneath, the roofs are held up by giant glulam girders spanning up to 14 metres and weighing up to five tons, bent into a double-curved structure using “long screws and a lot of force”, according to Magnus Holm Andersen, project manager at timber supplier Woodcon.
“As far as we know, this has never been done before,” he added.
From the central roof, visitors can take a yellow spiral staircase down past glazed office spaces and into the internal courtyard, which is supported by recycled reinforced steel beams and centred on a lone Norwegian maple tree.
A slide, visible in the top left-corner of the building, leads from the roof to the forest floor
Alternatively, a 14-metre long slide – reportedly Norway’s tallest – winds its way around the side of the building and back down onto the forest floor.
The square roof above the office area is one of only two concrete elements in the building alongside the foundation, both made from a mixture of high-strength and low-carbon concrete to minimise emissions and material use.
Stairs are mirrored on the interior and exterior of the building
On the inside, the factory is clad in light pinewood that stands in stark contrast to the exterior’s charred black finish.
Each of the four wings – housing Vestre’s woodwork and powder-coating workshops, as well as a warehouse and an assembly station – features colour-coded equipment and flow-chart-style floor markings designed to help visitors follow the production process from above.
The production line itself combines efficient machinery and artificial intelligence, which Vestre says helps it to “manufacture faster, greener and less expensively”.
Colourful floor markings illustrate the production process
In the colour workshop, for example, two industrial robots named after Norway’s first female engineers are powder-coating metal components using AI and object recognition, and are capable of changing colours in seconds rather than minutes.
Hidden behind the walls of each wing is a technical corridor, in which waste products from the manufacturing process are recycled for reuse.
Here, the water needed for washing metal components is cleaned and filtered so that 90 per cent of it can be cycled back into the process, while wood chips and sawdust are collected and sent off to a biomass power plant to be burned for electricity.
Two self-learning industrial robots paint metal furniture parts
Meanwhile, heat pumps capture excess energy from the process of drying the components and convert it into heat that is then fed back into the production line and used to warm the building.
“Since there’s one owner, it’s easy to do that,” said project manager Jan Myrlund. “Normally, one company owns the plant and another the inside and they deliver their own systems.”
Reducing waste and emissions was also a key consideration in the construction phase, with all equipment powered either by electricity or biodiesel and all felled trees reused as part of the building’s structure or stored for use in Vestre’s furniture.
Trees surround the building on almost all sides
The building’s footprint was deliberately rolled back to leave as many trees standing as possible and where the forest floor was removed, it was preserved and put back in so that greenery hugs the building on all but two sides.
“Normally, when we construct a building in the middle of the forest, we would take a lot more trees away,” said the project’s design manager Sindre Myrlund.
“Originally, we drew a line 10 metres away from the factory, which is more normal. And Vestre moved the line five metres in and said: if you need to remove more trees, you need to ask and get it approved.”
Vestre has previously claimed to be the “first furniture manufacturer in the world” to declare the carbon footprint of all its products.
These figures were prominently displayed on the brand’s award-winning stand at the 2020 Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair, which was later disassembled and reused to form an installation at Milan design week.
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Dezeen Showroom: a stool made from wood sourced through sustainable forestry and a 3D-printed chair made from recycled fishing nets are among the latest furniture designs on Dezeen Showroom that use sustainable materials.
Designers and brands are continually improving the sustainability of their designs in an attempt to lessen the negative impact on the environment, from the production and manufacturing stages to the longevity and lifecycle of the final product.
Included in this selection are products designed to follow circular economy principles, where parts can be replaced, repaired and recycled to increase the lifespan of the materials.
Also featured are furniture pieces made from recycled materials, including PET plastic bottles, cardboard and coffee waste.
From tables made from washed up sea plants to chairs with castor oil-based bioplastic seats, here’s a selection of the latest furniture designs made from sustainable materials on Dezeen Showroom.
Fels stool by OUT
Fels is a sculptural stool created by Berlin-based brand OUT, which is made from wood obtained through sustainable forestry.
The materials are forested in Germany and Austria at a rate that maintains the environment’s biodiversity and productivity, then handcrafted into Fels stools in Germany.
Available in a natural wood finish or in a range of bright colours, Fels has a jagged profile designed to give the appearance of carved stone.
Find out more about Fels ›
Kelp Collection chair by Interesting Times Gang
The Kelp Collection chair by Swedish studio Interesting Times Gang is made from recycled fishing nets, which gives it a bright green colour.
The fishing nets are combined with recycled FSC-certified wood fibres to create the furniture’s bio-composite material, which is 3D printed to create the chair’s curving form.
Interesting Times Gang designed the chair to bring awareness to the eradication of kelp forests due to unsustainable fishing practices and rising sea temperatures.
Find out more about Kelp Collection ›
Fluit chair by Archirivolto Design for Actiu
Created by Italian studio Archirivolto Design in collaboration with furniture brand Actiu, Fluit is a lightweight chair designed for both indoor and outdoor settings.
Around 80 per cent of the chair’s material is polypropylene plastic recycled from the agricultural food sector, while the remaining 20 per cent is recycled fibreglass which increases its strength.
Find out more about Fluit ›
Flek Pure by 3form is a completely recycled architectural material
Flek Pure is a recycled material created by architectural material manufacturer 3form to resemble terrazzo.
The material is made from 100 per cent recycled materials sourced from 3form’s in-house factory waste. The terrazzo look comes from pelletised trimmings of the brand’s resin products.
Available in a range of translucent colours, Flek Pure can be used to produce privacy partitions, room dividers, accent pieces and exterior walls.
Find out more about Flek Pure ›
Bowl table by Ayush Kasliwal for Mater
Danish furniture brand Mater has released Bowl, a table made from the brand’s Mater Circular Material which combines fibrous industrial waste with recycled plastic.
Mater developed the composite material with the aim of progressing their existing furniture collection from being sustainable to circular.
Bowl is available in two versions – one made from coffee shell waste and the other from sawdust. Plastic waste from bathroom fittings brand Grohe is recycled and acts as a binder.
Find out more about Bowl ›
Chatpod 700 by Jeffrey Ibañez for Impact Acoustic
Made from recycled materials, Impact Acoustic created the Chatpod 700 booth to provide a quiet meeting space for up to four people.
The booth’s structure is made from recycled cardboard and pressed sawdust. Recycled PET bottles are used to create the acoustic cladding and the felt-like interior finish.
Find out more about Chatpod 700 ›
LoopKitchen by Stykka
LoopKitchen by Danish startup Stykka is a kitchen with a circular design intended to increase its lifecycle.
The kitchen is made from replaceable birch plywood parts with optional Forbo linoleum fronts available in over 20 colours.
Users can replace parts of the kitchen as they get worn, broken or if they would like a new colour. Stykka then reuses or recycles the used parts.
Find out more about LoopKitchen ›
Dina chair by Adam Nathaniel Furman for Beit Collective
Adam Nathanial Furman has designed the Dina chair for Beit Collective, a colourful interpretation of traditional Lebanese “Khayzaran” chairs.
Instead of the traditional use of cane, Dina’s woven seat and backrest are made from durable castor oil-based bioplastic.
Find out more about Dina ›
Oceanides table collection by Alexia Mintsouli for Alex Mint
Oceanides is a collection of tables made from marble and the sea plant Posidonia Oceanica, designed by Alexia Mintsouli for UK studio Alex Mint.
By upcycling Posidonia Oceanica leaves that are washed up on the shore into tabletops, Alex Mint aimed to create a more eco-friendly furniture piece.
Find out more about Oceanides ›
Cross Bar chair by Pearson Lloyd for Takt
Design studio Pearson Lloyd created the Cross Bar chair for Takt with replaceable elements that can be repaired or recycled, extending the chair’s lifecycle.
The chair is available in three finishes of oak and can be optionally upholstered in a choice of eco-labelled textiles.
Find out more about Cross Bar ›
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Swedish designer Louise Hederström has worked with furniture brand Swedese to use leftover wood and plywood from a Cobe-designed building to create furniture for its public spaces.
Hederström‘s project Rephrased Matter, which was on show as part of the annual design festival Southern Sweden Design Days, saw the designer work together with Swedese to create a collection of furniture for the atrium, restaurant and meeting rooms in developer Skanska‘s Hyllie Terrass building.
Above: Louise Hederström’s designs were on show at Southern Sweden Design Days. Top image: a prototype of her stool for Skanska. Photo is courtesy of Hederström
The furniture will be made from materials such as plywood and wooden beams that were used during the construction of the building, which was designed by Danish studio Cobe, and would otherwise have been burned.
Hederström, who approached Skanska together with Linus Davidsson, sales representative at Swedese, said they will instead use the waste material from the building site for both “big and small projects.”
Waste materials and leftover materials were used to construct the furniture. Photo is courtesy of Louise Hederström
The first item is set of stools and a table that will be used in the building’s atrium. They were made from wooden latches and plywood used on the site to cover elevator shafts and as temporary staircase banisters.
“We don’t really know yet, but that’s also the part of the process – we see something, we save it and we and the latches was really something that was easy to see that this is possible to work with,” Hederström told Dezeen.
Hederström worked together with furniture company Swedese
The time-consuming process of designing furniture from scrap materials requires a lot more preparation than working with virgin wood does.
“You have to have time to collect the material, you have to store it and dry it,” Hederström explained. “It’s a longer process, and we’re learning by doing.”
For the stools Hederström combined waste wood with leftover materials from Swedese, as the padding and fabric material needed was not available from the building site itself.
Instead, the stools have a filling made from leftover sheepskin from Swedese’s production, covered by leather seats that are made from leather with minor imperfections that meant the company was unable to use them for other furniture.
A steel ring used in Swedese’s furniture production and made from 80 per cent recycled metal holds the stool’s wooden legs together.
A table made from wood matches the stools
The current collection also includes a table made from the same wood and plywood pieces, and Hederström also plans to use the wooden latches to create a long sofa that will sit in the central atrium.
For her, having to use already-cut wood and other materials in existing conditions was a welcome challenge, rather than a disadvantage.
“I like the challenge that you have a material to have to work with,” she said.
“So with the stool, I wanted to change the dimensions of course, but I wanted you to still feel the connection to the material and understand its construction, how it holds together.”
Hederström will also use wood from elm trees that have had to be felled because of Dutch Elm disease, while leftover materials from Swedish furniture and design companies will be used to create accessories for the interior of the building.
Other leftover materials will be used to create accessories
Hederström hopes that the initiative, which Skanska said it hopes to also expand to other buildings, will become more commonly used when constructing new buildings.
“I hoped that it would open their eyes, but also, I think that when they count and see ‘we have 1,000 metres of wood that we just throw away’ they can also say ‘let’s save it for next building’,” Hederström said.
“They can rethink their way of planning. And I think it was an eye-opener, that they realise that this is something that we could use. Especially when the world is a bit upside down, we have to take better care of material resources.”
Hyllie Terrass, the building that the furniture will be used in, was designed by Cobe for Skanska and is part of a pilot program for NollC02 buildings, which Skanska says will have net-zero emissions over their entire life cycle. It will be ready for occupation in spring 2023.
Hederström has previously made a concrete bench and traffic barrier using waste, while Swedese recently worked with graduate Mika Lindblad on a furniture collection designed without upholstery.
The photography is by Daniel Engvall unless otherwise stated.
Southern Sweden Design Days took place from 19 to 22 May 2022 in Malmö, Sweden. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.
As part of Stockholm Design Week, Swedish design firm Form Us With Love has opened the doors to its new studio space featuring modular furniture informed by pegboard walls.
Perforated steel units are dotted throughout Form Us With Love‘s (FUWL) Stockholm studio, which is housed in a former travel agency.
Form Us With Love’s Stockholm studio has furniture made from perforated steel
“We’ve been dealing with this space for a good year and a half, and thinking about it for a good ten years,” FUWL co-founder John Löfgren told Dezeen.
“It’s definitely a place that is a catalyst for what we’re doing – and we’re doing quite a lot of different things, so we need a really flexible space and we need a mobile space,” he added. “We tried to be smart about how you store things and logistics in general, really being economical with each square metre.”
Large hangar doors can be used to divide the interior
The 200-square metre studio space, which was created in collaboration with architecture studio Förstberg Ling and branding studio Figur, was designed to suit the needs of the FUWL team.
Large floor-to-ceiling hangar doors hide an office area, workshop and kitchen while allowing the front of the studio to be sectioned off from the remainder of the space.
The studio is showcasing material experiments on wheeled cabinets
This allows the area to be used as an exhibition space, where FUWL is displaying some of its ongoing projects during Stockholm Design Week.
Among these is a project that explores how toxic glass – a waste material from the glass industry – can be treated to separate the toxins from the glass.
Five low, wheeled cabinets made from perforated steel were used to display the projects.
FUWL has created multiple different storage units
These are just some of the storage units and room dividers that FUWL has made for the studio, drawing on materials found in its own workshop.
“We have these boxes that were derived from the workshop, like ones you would have in the garage,” Löfgren said.
“We started wondering what would happen if we move these things out in the open,” he added. “It started off as dividers and walls, but add some wheels and all of a sudden we are in the open space.”
The studio is currently using the modular units as a material library, a tool wall and storage for personal and studio use, as well as experimenting with new functionalities.
Produced by Tunnplåt – a company that normally supplies lockers to schools, gyms and other public-sector interiors – the containers have a pattern of symmetrical holes.
A material library is housed in their drawers
This was designed to make the reference to pegboard walls immediately recognisable.
“We definitely experimented with patterns,” Löfgren said. “We still wanted people to have a smile on their face like: I can see where it derives from.”
The pegboard-style furniture was informed by tool walls
Realising that the perforated steel units could be used to create a flexible interior was just a coincidence, Löfgren said.
“I think it’s definitely a tool that incorporates how we want to work in the interior,” he said. “And I think that’s just been a coincidence.”
“We were always looking for something that would help us have this kind of full flexibility, and still be able to do something both fun and functional,” he added.
The studio was designed to be both practical and flexible
In the future, the studio said it might also create the units in other colours. For its own office, soft grey tones were chosen to aid concentration.
“We worked with tones of grey as a backdrop throughout the space to put focus on the creative processes taking place within,” architecture studio Förstberg Ling said.
Form Us With Love has previously launched products such as Forgo, a soap designed to minimise carbon emissions and an IKEA chair made from recycled wood.
Form Us With Love’s studio is open to the public between 5 September and 9 September 2022 as part of Stockholm Design Week. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.
