Intern i January-February 2014
INteriors&architecture / 15
The colors of Teresa
“I
have always believed that houses have a soul and that spaces are alive, like people. I need to inhale a space before thinking of a project, because each space has its own identity.” This opening statement by Teresa Sapey, an Italian designer based in Madrid, sums up the meaning of her project in Bordeaux: the conversion of the 900
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square meters of an abandoned mechanical parts workshop to make a sunny Mediterranean loft for the glamorous lifestyle of a young French couple with one daughter. “When I visited the place for the first time,” she recalls, “there was still a strong smell of motor oil and sweat. My steps echoed in a sort of 20th-century cathedral of labor and you could still see Pirelli calendars hung behind the restroom. A masculine space of hard work and power.” She had carte blanche, so with a bit of humor and irony she was able to perform magic: conserving the original layout, thanks to the height
of the volumes she has managed to play with disorienting planes of perception, with incisive graphic signs that are also fluid, rigorous and light, inventing a “reversed” planimetric that leads to continuous surprises. In analogous terms, she has dismantled and reassembled ‘the machine for living’ like a compositional collage of mechanical parts. With many pieces made to measure. One arrives from a small entrance, a space with a low ceiling, almost Lilliputian, which extends over a cellar of age-old wines stored in the holes of a white wall, like soap bubbles.
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