Dutch Invertuals designs Tiny Offices from corrugated aluminium plates

Design studio Dutch Invertuals has created a collection of compact offices made from corrugated aluminium and wood for Dutch holiday park operator Droomparken.

Named Tiny Offices, the small workspaces were designed to be places where you could "freely dream, perform and create". They have been installed in two of Droomparken's holiday parks in the Netherlands.

Dutch Invertuals has designed four Tiny Offices

The compact offices measure just over six square metres and were built from raw corrugated aluminium plates, with wooden doors and a large window frame on the front facade.

"The biggest inspiration came from projects which were completely embedded in natural surroundings," said Dutch Invertuals architect Chris Collaris and design director Wendy Plomp.

The Tiny Offices were built with corrugated aluminium walls

"It's almost an 'end of the world-place' with that big window overlooking it," Collaris and Plomp told Dezeen.

"The actual space itself didn't need to be very big."

Each of the Tiny Office interiors was designed by a different designer

The Tiny Offices have custom-designed interiors in different colours, clad in materials including felt and acrylic that were chosen for their functionality.

"The interiors are designed to create the most optimal work environment, where you can concentrate and work but also lay down on a beautifully designed daybed to think and look outside," Collaris and Plomp explained.

"Because it is a small and intimate space, all materials should make sense. Therefore we used an acrylic wall that makes the space look more spacious, but you can also write on it."

Tijmen Smeulders designed a paired-back colour scheme for one Tiny Office

The interiors were designed by three designers Raw Color, Thomas Ballouhey and Tijmen Smeulders.

Each designer created their own colour scheme, with some choosing a colourful identity and some going for darker, more sophisticated hues.

Designer Raw Colour added colour wall art to its Tiny Office

Droomparken, which runs holiday parks across the Netherlands, commissioned the project for Dutch Design Week in 2018 with the aim of creating a space that would be better to work in than a traditional office.

Today there are four Tiny Offices, with more to potentially be installed in the future.

Raw Colour also upholstered the chair in pink material

Their project became more timely as the coronavirus pandemic struck.

"In these last years offices have become more green and healthy, but criticism of the modern contemporary office has come to the surface, and today the office seems to be under pressure because of the COVID-19 virus," Collaris and Plomp explained.

"The units got more attention because going to the normal office was not an option any more. Tiny Offices were and are a much safer place than the traditional office."

Thomas Ballouhey designed the interiors of the final office

Tiny Offices has been longlisted for the Dezeen Awards 2020 in the small workspace interior category.

Dutch Invertuals previously designed an exhibition celebrating at the circle and experimented with creating products from unwanted household junk to produce less.

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Klemens Schillinger creates Off-Grid Lamp for remote Austrian castle

The Off-Grid Lamp developed by designer Klemens Schillinger needs to be charged up through physical effort, in a bid to help users reassess their relationship to electricity.

It was developed as part of the designer's residency at Schloss Hollenegg, a castle in the Austrian countryside that offers young designers a space for exhibitions and workshops.

Due to its secluded location, several of its rooms are not connected to the electricity grid, leading Schillinger to conceptualise a light that has to be charged manually using a crank generator.

The lamp consists of brass shade and a deep green, milled aluminium body, which can be docked into the matching, wall-mounted or tabletop charging stations that are strewn across the castle.

Cranking up the generator charges the small battery that is integrated into the stem. One minute of cranking is able to power its LEDs for more than six minutes.

Removing the lamp from its charging dock transforms it into a portable torch.

"As the lamp was conceived during my residency at Schloss Hollenegg, I drew inspiration from the medieval torches and sconces that were used to move through the castle at night," Schillinger told Dezeen.

"I tried to create a lamp that can work as a torch but also can stand on its own, so it has a heavy base."

Beyond responding to the practical constraints of the castle, Schillinger hopes that the design is able to help users consider how much they take electricity for granted.

"I think we are often not aware of how much energy it takes for certain machines to work," he explained.

"The Off-Grid Lamp offers a nice way to understand how much energy needs to be created to produce a few minutes of light and therefore might make us consider our energy consumption."

The project was recently longlisted for a Dezeen Award in the lighting design category, with shortlists set to be announced at the start of September.

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art, Schillinger has worked with brands including Swedish furniture brand Hem and Danish textile company Kvadrat.

Several of his projects hope to help their users develop a healthier relationship to technology, including a lamp that only lights up when the user surrenders their smartphone and a therapeutic Substitute Phone.

The video and images are courtesy of Leonhard Hilzensauer.

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Take a trip back to 90s Manchester and its famed music scene in Amelia Troubridge’s nostalgic series

Tony Wilson, Shaun Ryder, Terry Christian, Dave Haslam, Eliot Rashman and New Order’s Stephen Morris are just a few of the well known names featuring in the British photographer’s acclaimed series.

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Decada Muebles spotlights local craft inside Mexico's Escondido Oaxaca Hotel

Interiors studio Decada Muebles has filled this boutique hotel in Oaxaca City, Mexico with pieces made by the region's artisans.

A majority of the Escondido Oaxaca Hotel takes over a former family home that dates back to the 19th century.

Inside are four of the hotel's total 12 guest rooms – the last eight are located just beyond the house within a more contemporary concrete tower erected by architect Alberto Kalach.

This mixture of old and new influenced Decada Muebles' design of the hotel, which has been almost exclusively decked out with pieces crafted by local craft makers.

"We wanted to create a feeling of timelessness inside an authentic Oaxacan house, where the guests could feel the presence of a craftsman's hand through their work in every nook and cranny," the interior design studio told Dezeen.

"With a mix of minimalism and clean lines in our furniture choices, and the lush landscaping and garden design, we aimed to maximize the possibility of relaxation and sense of serenity as the underlying state while at the hotel."

Guests enter the hotel via the old house, walking through a spacious lobby that's dotted with oversized terracotta plant pots.

Red bricks run across the floor, while the walls are loosely rendered with stucco – faded patches of paint left behind from the house's old fit-out are still visible.

These rustic walls continue through into the restaurant, which serves up a menu of Mexican fusion food.

Local craftsmen have used Sabino, a Mexican wood, to make the tables and chairs that appear throughout the room. They complement a gridded timber shelving unit that openly displays liquor bottles and glassware.

The floor here is clad with locally sourced green-cement tiles – the colour was specifically chosen in a subtle nod to Cantera, a green-hued volcanic rock that's native to Oaxaca and used to build several of its buildings and roads.

When they're not relaxing around the pool, which is up on the roof, guests can head to the split-level "culture room".

It includes a small library and a cosy sofa area decorated with earth-tone vases.

Guest rooms in the old house and the concrete tower have been finished in the same material palette that's been applied throughout Escondido Oaxaca Hotel's communal spaces.

Green-tinted cement tiles cover surfaces in the en-suite bathrooms and Sabino wood has been used to create the rooms' side tables, bed frames and shutters, which can be pushed back to reveal balconies or foliage-filled patios.

Details like the woven palm leaf headboards were also custom made in Oaxaca.

Escondido Oaxaca Hotel is longlisted in the hotel and short-stay category of this year's Dezeen Awards.

It will compete against the likes of Trunk House, a boutique hotel in Tokyo that includes a miniature disco, and Casa Palerm, a guest villa in Mallorca which is fronted by a huge cinema screen-like window.

Photography is by Undine Pröhl.

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Five designs with a sense of humour by EJR Barnes

Self-taught designer EJR Barnes makes furniture and lighting pieces with "a wry smile". We've rounded up five of his surrealist projects, including a club chair wrapped in Venetian blinds and a table lamp with a candle instead of a bulb.

With a background in sculpture and poetry, London-based Barnes aims to turn "floaty ideas" into functional pieces that question the purpose of the original objects.

"The main thing for me is that there is always a bit of a wry smile happening, without it looking like the whole thing is a joke," he told Dezeen.

"To be making things like this, you've got to have a sense of humour. Because if you take yourself too seriously when you're making arty furniture, then who really are you?"

A different business model for design

Barnes is one of a new generation of designers, which has been enabled by the internet to eschew traditional design education and retail systems.

He learned how to make furniture through YouTube videos, initially working from the backroom of his day job, and now sells his pieces largely with the help of Instagram.

"I've met some incredible clients who are interested in working with me because they've followed what I've been doing for a while," said the designer.

"Using Instagram as a tool means that I can have this very lean business model where it's just me in a studio and a couple of fabricators making things according to demand."

Here, Barnes picks out five pieces that exemplify his approach:

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Desk with Four Vessels

Barnes frequently designs hybrid objects with two or more uses in mind.

This desk, for example, features four cylindrical vessels embedded into its steel base. The client, a curator and magazine editor living in east London, is now using these to grow small orange trees.

"We got really into this idea of having a vista under your work," said Barnes.

"So when you look through the window at the garden you see foliage behind glass, and then if you look down through the desk you see foliage behind glass. It creates this dual meaning for the object, which serves as a place for work but also does something else for you."

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A Wild Sheep Chaise; Dolphin Hotel Club Chair

Venetian blinds wrap around this cuboid chair, encased in cork window frames.

Hidden behind these is a series of strip lights, which emit an ominous glow when illuminated.

"There's something about Venetian blinds, the patterns and the rhythm of the slats, that I really like," Barnes explained. "You could see them in the background of a film noir, with dusty light filtering through these stayed window coverings."

"I wanted to use this feeling I got from the blinds in something that wasn't a window," he added. "By using them to block out a chair it almost creates this idea that there might be something behind them."

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Junior Downhill Anvil

This low side table is made out of plywood and other readily available materials, which Barnes gave the vibrant, polished finish of a vehicle.

The final result resembles a "spaceship sledge" and forms part of a larger, but largely unpublished, portion of his work that is all about sledges.

"I got really interested in people displaying automobilia and historic motorbikes in their homes. And I wanted to create fake examples of this, like fictional objects for movement," he said.

"They never have engines or anything that's too obviously about cars; it's more within the sculptural form. If you look at people like [Romanian artist Constantin] Brâncuși, he did these beautiful carvings, which have a slickness to them that resembles race cars but is simultaneously very primitive."

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Bavette, The Glacier, A Silver Room

Since Barnes got his own studio a year ago, he has built or assembled all of his pieces himself, eliminating the need for a finalised render to send to fabricators and allowing him to take a more iterative approach.

This coffee table started from the simple idea of using a kidney-shaped tabletop, cut from a slice of red travertine that resembles the marbling of a steak.

"The process was almost like assembling a collage," he said. "As soon as I had the idea in my head that the tabletop was a slab of meat, the client and I went on the hunt for the kinds of objects that could prop it up."

"It was more like creating a piece of art than a design. You can make a mark, decide it's wrong and change the whole thing or make another mark and take another step and go in a different direction with it."

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Analogue Table Lamp No.1

This candle holder is one of several metalwork pieces created by the designer during the coronavirus lockdown, while he taught himself how to weld.

The design is Barnes' take on the classic Armani Casa lighting range, which features "variations of a pyramid on a stick". Here, this motive is rendered entirely in metal and with a candle instead of a lightbulb. 

"It's a bit of a joke, really. An analogue table lamp is like the ouroboros of design eating its own tail because we invented electricity to get rid of candles but people want the look of both, no matter if it's not functional," said the designer.

"I want to be playful with form but without sacrificing subtlety. A lot of people, when they say they prioritise form over function, create these crazy, pink, fluffy wherever. Whereas I still want things to be quite reserved."

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