Text description provided by the architects. This duplex apartment is part of the Mirage Development in De Waterkant, a trendy suburb located in the heart of Cape Town. The brief was to create a sanctuary for slickers and to create a space that captures ‘urban chic,’ combining contemporary living with high design. The design of the apartment expresses a distinctly modern African attitude that is current with today’s demands of fast-paced city living. It is a space of calm and serenity for re-energising, relaxing within, floating above the city streets of its location.
The interior is a stylized and dynamic clutter-free space that is a forward-thinking, contemporary luxury urban space that maximizes spatial use, cutting edge design and technology. To define the bare spaces we conceptualized a black and white color pallet as the base fabrics for the walls, floors, and ceilings. The concept was to create a light living space with a dark bedroom cubicle cantilevered overhead. This theme of day and night was introduced to reflect the way in which the apartment functions differently at various times of the day.
To break up the ‘box space’, angular and facetted elements were introduced in the stair and ceilings to create drama and interest. A glass bridge extension adds additional floor area to the apartment and functions as a library platform. To keep the apartment spacious and to accentuate additional floor space, a number of the design elements such as the joinery, kitchen counters, and the TV wall ledge float. Concealed lighting has been added to these elements for more dramatic lighting effects. The brief also required that we create a master dressing room.
Due to the size of the apartment, we combined the master dressing room and en-suite bathroom into one and created a dark, ‘moody’ sanctuary for bathing and dressing. There was a strong emphasis on rhythm, geometric forms and graphic elements that are reflective of modern patterns. The general color pallet was kept crisp and monochromatic for a clean and uncluttered look and feel. This was warmed up with a beautiful dark wood parquet flooring and again the warm timber is picked up in the angular graphic timber screen used behind the bedroom wall to separate the dressing room en-suite. The parquet flooring, concealed LED lighting and décor items bring the added dimension of warmth into the space.
