CAFE+SHOP+MUSEUM HOUSE (OR A HOUSE FOR A SERIAL COLLECTOR!)
The design began with a rather challenging brief for a house: the process started off with an inventory of personal artefacts that a very entrepreneurial young couple had amassed out of their interest for vintage memorabilia and furniture pieces that reminded them of their childhood days. From old clocks, radios, telephones, to new (and still expanding) collections of limited edition designer shoes as well as vodka and whiskey bottles, the couple had a story to tell about each object. We hoped to weave these disparate objects into a coherent narrative within the house.
We explored the display cabinet as a space to house objects of value, organising the various separate objects placed within it, and even drawing attention to the objects on exhibit. In the House for a Serial Collector, the display cabinet takes the form of three walls that are in themselves spectacles of form and geometry that become reference points to guide the storyteller through the spaces of the house, revealing the inventory of objects in the process.
A facetted wall made up of triangulated surfaces with box shelves set within, draws one from the gate and into the house, along a “shop-front” stack displaying an extensive shoe collection and a pair of folding cinema seats re-appropriated as a shoe bench. The facetted wall turns, moving past the cement screed floor of the “open air” café and bar, around a chevron-cut teak wall with an assortment of vintage curios hanging from a scaffold structure in front of it, and into the living room with a portrait of a furry dear friend where the wall ends. Now we come face to face with a Donald Duck Menagerie Figure that used to be part of a local now non-existent amusement park carrousel in the 1980s. On the back wall, the door to the bedroom sits within rows and rows (or columns) of brightly-lit bottles, big and small.
Sometimes we like to think that a swimming pool can be found behind.
