A lot of houses in the Netherlands are delivered “casco” meaning that what you get is a rough but watertight space but not including things like floors or kitchens. Even rentals are sometimes found like this where the previous tenant has taken their floor with them when they moved out. In general, this means that things that are highly taste specific are chosen directly by the buyer and you avoid standard kitchens which are pulled out and replaced immediately when someone moves in.

While this means a whole lot less wasted material and money, it also means that people are buying new build homes without any idea of what they will feel like or how to fit in new elements.

In this project the problem was made even more complicated by how tall the ceilings were – something that would be fundamental to the feeling of the space but was hard to judge in the plans.

One of the services I’ve been offering lately is helping people who are buying homes understand what can fit in the plans that they’ve received and starting to design the insides sometimes before construction has even begun. Here, I designed the layout of the entire house but put special attention into how the kitchen interacted with the unusually tall ceilings. The clients were very happy with it once they finally saw the space and how the kitchen fit in it, and the developers building the block even started offering my design to other tenants in the complex who had similar units. Overall it was a great process in helping people visualise their future homes and organise how their lives would occupy a space they hadn’t seen yet.