Project Description
This filmmaker’s apartment reinterprets the use of poché to support Baroque theatricality and proposes a cinematic architecture of sequence and frame. The use of “virtual poché” in the Baroque to hide service spaces is updated through a cinematic emphasis on thinness and surface instead of solidity and mass. The apartment occupies the top floor of an Art Deco-era hotel converted to condominiums. A challenge posed by the site is that despite 15-foot ceilings, the windows were small and low. We conceived the living space as a pseudo-exterior, pushing private and utilitarian spaces behind a wall of Oak veneer. A private roof deck above is accessed from stairs in the compressed space of the poché. The strategy is evident in how we organized the plan: utilitarian spaces hug the inside of the L-shaped condominium and bedrooms occupy the ends leaving an open loft for work, everyday life and entertaining. To contrast the crisp wood wall, we treated other spaces with a volumetric application of color such as the “blue zone” of the virtual poché. Bathrooms and bedrooms have unique colors so that each space takes on its own personality. Custom CNC-perforated paneling and flush rolling doors with hidden hardware animate the apartment.