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Sustainable Interiors: Reused, redesigned and upcycled
Client: University of Gothenburg – Annedalsseminariet
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
Directive:
Redesign this penthouse-level student dining/kitchen interior with sustainability and reuse at top of mind. Maximize seating. Create a space that invites students to use the room for dining, but also as a team meeting point or quiet study room.
Our finished interior includes:
– A Vilax wall sofa, designed with fabric remnants sourced from the back shelves at the sofa manufacturer’s warehouse
– Oak chairs and our reCreate Design Co. custom-made wooden lamps for added warmth and organic layers
– Small white café table tops cut from unused university desktops, mounted on table bases purchased from used office furniture reseller Rekomo
– A reCreate Design Co. custom bi-level dining table, redesigned from existing tables at the university and built by Snickeriet
– White café chairs purchased from Rekomo
– Ceiling lamp cluster and heavy-duty barstools purchased from a local thrift shop
Behind the scenes:
When we asked our university professor friend, Staffan, if he knew anything about the history of this building, we had a collection of photos and information in our inbox within the hour! We absolutely love creating bespoke art specific to a space, and we were able to embed both the images and historical text into the wall art we created for this student lounge. Look closely at the photos and you’ll see faces peeking through the scraped paint technique. This grand old building was a community school to educate teachers in its former life. Now it houses classrooms and meeting spaces for university students.
We had great fun rummaging for fabric remnants around the back warehouse shelves at Vilax in southern Sweden. And when we did find the perfect combination of colors, it was a puzzle to make sure we had enough fabric to maintain the design we envisioned. Let’s just say we were sent back to the warehouse more than once to find a replacement fabric there wasn’t enough of a chosen fabric.
That bi-level table was a fun design to realize! We reused and refinished the out-of-date wooden dining tables that were already in this room. To that we added 2 white desktops that were no longer needed by the university and our carpenter friends at Snickeriet helped us out by securing them all together and adding a white strip of reclaimed wood from their own workshop to fill out the width of the lower section (we like to call it a discreet racing stripe). We reused the previous table bases for the lower section, and found taller bases on the secondhand furniture market for the bar level.
And finally, every reCreate Design Co. interior needs to touch of whimsy! We collected odd wooden-shaped objects from various thrift shops and created our own redesigned wooden pendant lamps to hang over the café tables. These were fun to make! We sanded every bowl, candlestick, sofa leg, and other miscellaneous wooden piece down to the bare wood with the intent to stain them a dark wood color once we joined the right shapes and forms together for our lamps – each one with an upside down bowl to house the bulbs. But when we saw the beauty of their natural wood essence, we quickly changed to a soft clear wax for protection – and we’re happy we did! They add the right amount of ‘organic’ into this otherwise modern finish interior.
Sustainable reuse interiors in action!
