About
Spring 2024
A polymorphic and programattically non-prescriptive remote room supporting an array of follies. Put simply, it’s a children’s playhouse designed, built, and raffled to support local charity: Henrico CASA.
My Role Lead project manager in design and construction administration. Lead drafter. Lead painter. Murphy bed upholsterer.
Do Hut provides the opportunity for constructively occupying one’s self without prescribing how one should do it.
In 64 square-feet, Do Hut provides four interactive built-ins that transfigure in both form and use to foster a spectrum of static and dynamic activities:
- Storage Unit / Work Surface
- Murphy Bed / Chalkboard
- Window Seat / Chest / Chalkboard
- Hearth / Chimney / Lookout
Matrix of storage niches spanned by a standing-height work surface, capped with an eye-height peg board. This unit is bound by its thick, box-like surround and its contrast in color to its adjacencies.
Centered in axis with the storage unit. In its vertical “closed” position, it is a framed chalkboard fringed by two press-on scalloped sconces. In its horizontal “open” position, it is a cushioned bed for laying, planarly even with the neighboring window seats.
Situated before the operable windows and flanking the hearth. A functional and mechanical combination of the storage unit and murphy bed. Three cloistered planes (seat, window, chalkboard) intersect, stacked over the hinged chest, for the combined event of resting, reflecting, creating, and collecting.
The figurative and literal hearth of the room. Centered in plan, the expression of a fireplace opens to receive the user, who can crouch through and climb up the chimney by way of ladder. The chimney is peaked by a dome window, providing a 360° view over the room’s exterior structure.
Since these amenities line the room’s periphery, most of the floor plan is open space - volunteered to the user’s programattic autonomy. Do Hut’s non-prescriptive elements aim to provide a house of rest / work / play - of which its users would not age out.
The playhouses in this charity event reflect the prompt “change a child’s story.” Hence, the children’s book Goodnight Moon is this house’s aesthetic inspiration.
The house emphasizes the thoughtful use of modest materials. The room’s structure is a marriage between the orthogonal and the curvalinear, sheathed in color. Its form is an 8’ x 8’ x 8’ box with one radiused edge - springing from an interior datum line that distinguishes wall from ceiling.
If the users grow out of the room’s child-centric decorations (painted moon, balloon, etc.), then they can simply paint over them. For this reason, no decorative elements are designed in any dimension other than paint.
See more about the work CASA does here.