Zauberkast
from text by H. Ibelings
Refurbishment of a 17th Century Canalhouse
Amsterdam, NL ‘13
architect Bureau LADA
design team Lada Hršak, Job van der Sande
client Anke Quene Ritter
cabinetmaker M. Pekelharing
photos Dieuwertje Komen
text by Hans Ibelings
Lada Hršak has completed a small project in a seventeenth-century canal house in Amsterdam, of which the smallness is its essence. The project is designed for a client who is anticipating that when she is getting older the typical Dutch very steep stairs in her house will become an obstacle. She decided therefore to contract her household on one single floor of approximately 35 square meters, and asked Hršak to accommodate all the basic dwelling functions in this small, but quite high room.
Hršak solved this uncommon brief with a cabinet that houses a pantry-like kitchen, a shower and toilet, ample storage space and a foldable queen-size bed that doubles as a daybed when the real bed is folded.
When all doors and panels are closed and the roller blind in front of the day bed is lowered, the cabinet is an abstract object that is hardly an intrusion in this seventeenth-century living room. Just behind the entrance leading from a little hall to the room and near the back window, the depth of the cabinet is just seven centimeters, which makes it almost absent. The cabinet contains three references to its context by repeating the typical ogee-shaped profile on the entrance door: mirrored, directly behind the door, above the daybed and on the edge of the sliding panel in front of the kitchen. These motives, little homages to the seventeenth-century woodcarving, help the cabinet to blend in.
The client, who is a German film maker, spends only part of her time in her Amsterdam house. She calls the cabinet a Zauberkast, a nice neologism, mixing German and Dutch. It means 'magic cabinet', a word that somehow brings to mind the cabinets of curiosities that became fashionable at the end of the sixteenth century. While those cabinets of curiosities were elaborate displays of objects of art and nature, this cabinet is the opposite. It does not show much.
Given its substantial content, the cabinet is astonishingly small, with a length of only 5.5 meter and a depth of no more than 67 centimeters. By concentrating all the definable parts of a dwelling, which are used only a limited amount of time, in one piece of furniture, the remaining 90 per cent of the house is left for what takes place the rest of the time: the much harder to define activity of living.
In this cabinet the kitchen is smaller than a galley in an airplane, the toilet-cum-shower is more compact than on most sailing boats, and the daybed is smaller than a couchette in a night train – thanks to the red fabric of the daybed the allusion to train compartments is hard to miss.
While most architectural projects easily outsize their importance, here it is the other way around. This project has definitely a bigger significance than its small size suggests. It is a bespoke solution for a particular client who clearly knew what she wanted, but at the same time the Zauberkast of Hršak has the potential of being a prototype, for living on a small footprint.