From Commercial to Residential
Cristiana Felgueiras – artist, maker, and content creator behind the YouTube channel GET HANDS DIRTY – and her partner live in a rented apartment that she was given permission to fully redesign. The 43sqm/463sqft space is located just a few minutes from the water in downtown Porto, Portugal, within a building originally constructed in the ’70s for commercial purposes. Their unit in particular used to be a small office that had nothing more than two rooms and a small bathroom. In recent years, most of the units have been converted into small apartments.
Choosing materials that fit within their low budget, Cristiana renovated and built everything from scratch. A wardrobe working simultaneously as a privacy wall from the entry marks the primary division of the new space. The layout was planned so that the balcony door would be closest to the kitchen, while the window was closer to the living and sleeping area. The furniture was constructed along the walls so that the centre of the space would remain mostly open and empty – keeping it from feeling too cramped. One obstacle Cristiana encountered in planning this space was that none of the walls were perpendicular, nor the corners square; yet, the custom furniture made the most of these awkward niches or gaps with specially designed cupboards for storage.
Multipurpose Everything
At first glance, the living space looks to be composed of a spacious sofa, a coffee table, a media console, a desk, and a large built-in storage unit; however, all these pieces have clever dual purposes that make them so much more. The large unit, for example, contains a Murphy bed, while the coffee table itself can be converted into a higher desk-like table for eating or working from the couch. The work desk to the right of the unit clever stows the couple’s keyboard in a pull-out drawer, while the media console serves as a room divider with an abundance of storage, including a “parking lot” for their robot vacuum cleaner.
Cristiana explained that having a large, fully equipped kitchen was a priority for them because after her studio, it’s the place she gets most creative. There is an abundance of storage that helps to disguise all appliances with the exception of the oven and cooktop. The large kitchen is matched by their extendable dining table, which can seat around eight to ten people (and provides extra space for preparing such a big meal, too). Similarly great for entertaining is their large balcony, which features a green wall of bamboo and an integrated vertical garden. “We chose to cover this wall with bamboo to hide the messy structure behind it”, said Cristiana, “and the vertical garden allowed us to have many plants and bits of life where an otherwise blank and boring wall would be”.
A similar ethos of opting for a bit of life or playfulness over the dull continues in the blue sky theme of the bathroom. A cloud motif begins on two laundry baskets that cleverly hang above the door. “It’s so much fun throwing clothes up there every day, and they are easy to bring down using a step stool”, Cristiana told NTS. Drifting upward, 3D-printed fluffy clouds continue onto the light fixture, which can actually be seen from the living room via an interior window, offering a warm and relaxing atmosphere to the whole apartment.
Work, Vision, Thinking
One thing is clear when touring Cristiana and her partner’s Porto home: every square inch was counted and considered. “Building this whole apartment was a great way to explore good working techniques and materials”, said Cristiana. “This was the first time I planned an entire space and building every centimetre of it made me truly value the amount of work, vision, and thinking that is put into creating fully functional homes with so little space available”.
