Do-Chaar Apartment | PayaPayrang Architectural Group

Transforming a box into a home
There were not many choices; according to our limited budget, we bought a unit of 80 square meters in a 20-year-old apartment in the northwest of Shiraz. Apartments which we visited were all old and tired. Although they have been kindly renovated, they could not become a fresh place to live in. We decided to buy one of these boxes and do our best to make it “a home”. Unit No 24, which is located in sixth floor with a better view than other units, two small and dark bedrooms and a balcony which was useless. It was the first time that we had to design our home. As our job become as a factor that form our lifestyle, we preferred to have a home not only for rest but also to answer our different needs; Having a personal library to read in peace, a studio to make our handcrafts, composing and recording music, and also our personal screen for watching movies.

When we were thinking about all this, the corona virus expanded, and changed the life style of people all around the world. So, the studio, library, and cinema were forcibly relocated and coming to our homes. Along with the pandemic and financial constraints on reconstruction, the worn-out box also imposed its own rules; Immutable walls at the border between inside and outside and chimneys that were the gift of the lower units in the middle of our box. But we also had our solutions; We removed everything we could. By removing the partitions, light was allowed to spread throughout the unit at any time of the day, even in the bathroom. It is now possible to place the greens of Strelitzia and Ficus lyrate everywhere. We removed cooling equipment from the balcony and changed the balcony to a bright greenhouse. the view of the neighbor to the heart of the home in the balcony has been closed with frosted glass and only let the light in through the skylight. The walls which were divided the space into rooms, hallway, and bathroom were replaced by black closets that slid into the white box and creating flexible spaces in different sides, sometimes pre-planned for an activity and sometimes a random one.

During the pandemic, we have a working space which is good for virtual business meetings. There is no permanent bedroom, whenever we are tired, we put the mattress and the four pallets under it in front of the balcony, adjacent to the books. In the new white box, thanks to the four wheels of closets, you can move the boundaries of the spaces a little further and talk from the kitchen to the other side of the home.

Here, with the help of the spaces, views and lights that you can see it everywhere, everything can be imagined in this difficult time. Unlike Orhan Pamuk, who said I did not become an architect because I did not want to design an apartment, we would say that we know why we got into architecture. As Pamuk puts it: "Like Dostoevsky's heroes who use their imaginations to cling to life even in the most desperate conditions, we know how to turn our buildings into homes, even in the most difficult of circumstances."