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Photographs by Sam Fentress
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Interior space using inexpensive, innovative materials in nontraditional ways.
During the day, 3130 Sutton looks pretty straightforward. The building is new, but it’s constructed with old-school brick detailing that helps it blend in with the rest of the Maplewood neighborhood. Drive by at night, though, and you’ll see that the interior is filled with a soft blue sci-fi glow. Near the window is a giant drop of water rendered in glass, filled with sparkling shards and lit from above with dozens of tiny LEDs.
This is the headquarters of Space Interiors, a collective of architects and designers who specialize in interior architecture. That’s not the same thing as interior design (and, heaven forbid, not interior decorating) but rather a holistic approach to creating indoor environments. Space handles the big stuff (blueprints, floor plans) and the detail work (colors, textures, lighting).
“There are many firms in St. Louis that have an architecture department and an interior-design department, but they don’t often work together,” says architect Tom Niemeier, Space’s founder. “The architecture group will take it to a certain point and then hand it off and say, ‘Here, pick some carpet colors.’ We’re a much more collaborative group. We’re mostly architects, but we have an interior designer and someone who’s very good at graphics, so we all worked together to build the space.”
Although the giant glass water drop was first ordered for a client (the concept for that job was the flowing, eternal nature of water), Niemeier decided that it actually worked well for Space, too. Designed by a European company, Leucos, it’s the only light fixture of its type in the United States. Enthusiasm for unusual contemporary design is a Space thing, and so is the water metaphor. The office is all about circular flow: The client-seating area melts into the conference room area, which is just around the corner from the open studio area. The materials library abuts the studio and leads to a hallway hung with finished projects—which leads back to the client-seating area.
“What we tried to do,” Niemeier says, “was design a space that is creative and inspiring for us as a staff but also educational for clients.” Because Space specializes in innovative materials, the presence of those materials was key to helping eliminate communication breakdowns between designer and client—but challenging to execute. “We wanted to put in as many different products as possible but do it in a way that didn’t make the space look all chopped up,” Niemeier explains.
“We’ve got eight different types of flooring in here—carpet tiles, slate, stained concrete, ceramic tile, wood, cork—all in areas that we think are appropriate.” The slate tiles near the doorway are durable, and their texture helps keep people from slipping. “But we can also say to people, ‘Hey, this is what slate looks like,’” Niemeier says.
Other elements are more decorative - the conference-room doors, for example. “It’s just two panes of glass with salvaged broken tempered glass in the middle,” Niemeier says. “We’ve done this a few times; it’s been really popular.”
Though this office is designed to be open and flowing, conference rooms must be closed off from time to time, and Space’s is no different. When those nifty glass doors are pulled shut, sound is absorbed into a state-of-the-art acoustical ceiling designed by Hunter Douglas. A far cry from the depressing dropped acoustic ceilings of most high schools, these ceiling tiles are dense fabric-covered squares, hinged to allow easy access to lighting, pipes and wiring above. (It’s the lighting above these tiles that gives Space its blue glow at night.) The conference table, made in-house, looks like marble but is actually colored, polished concrete—and is virtually indestructible: Even samples of granite don’t leave scratches on its surface.
Another Space-made element that’s big on wow is the long metal wall in the studio, which is constructed from the simplest of industrial materials: huge sheets of raw steel treated with muriatic acid.
“The acid is normally used to clean masonry, but in this case it ate away at the oily residue on the top layer of the steel that prevents it from rusting,” Niemeier says. “We sprayed water on it, and you can watch it turn gold right in front of your eyes. It happens in 30 seconds. We were doing it when it was sunny and hot, so it was instantaneous. Then we just put a couple coats of varnish over the top.”
The rusty patina from the acid wash is pretty to look at, a little like mineral veins in rock, but this wall is also practical. The designers use magnets to tack up images from projects in progress where everyone can see them.
Another material that Space is quite fond of is MDF—medium-density fiberboard, denser than what you see in most Home Depot stores. It can be sanded, stained any color, and then sealed with a finish that renders it almost indestructible. All of the designers’ desks are made of MDF and stained bright yellow—a far cry from their original manila-folder beige. They’re also modular, with storage areas that can be pushed to the side if the group needs to meet in the center of the room. “Our studio is very open so that we can talk to each other and collaborate,” Niemeier says. “A lot of the things done in an architectural firm are the result of creative people coming together.”
In the kitchen, two acrylic sheets were cut in half to create a sort of curvy “ceiling” with lighting above it. The poured-concrete floor was stained red, then lacquered. Built-in shelves contain glass art from Ibex (a beloved but defunct local company), and the steel countertop’s ground finish is topped with a coat of lacquer.
Though the Space staffers are whizzes with finishes, they had nothing to do with the gleaming metallic tiles in the bathroom. Punctuated with little dots—the style name is Rain, a reference to the giant water droplet in the lobby—they were left over from the reception area Space designed for Icon Contracting upstairs. When Niemeier founded Space earlier this year, he followed Icon to this building because the two firms had such a good working relationship, sharing floor tiles, space and projects.
One of the most impressive areas at Space is the materials library, with MDF squares in different colors and finishes and floor-to-ceiling shelving filled with samples—carpet, paint, ceramic tile, wall coverings, granite, marble and “nontraditional materials,” including standard particleboard, which can’t be sanded but can be stained and put to good use in certain types of projects.
“What’s critical is to get colors and finishes and materials that actually look like you think they’re going to look in the end-user space, so you have to duplicate the lighting,” Niemeier says. This is exactly what the company has done: Inside the library are three grids of lights that can be turned on all at once or one at a time.
“I don’t want to pick out paint colors in cool fluorescent light when the client has warm fluorescent light or halogen, because the colors may be completely different,” he explains. “Here, we can replicate their light. It really is a laboratory.”
The library floor is cork, a dream material once it’s laid down. It absorbs shock, is renewable and has a nice warm look. But laying this floor was a trick, Niemeier says, because the moisture level had to be just right or the floor would buckle.
Another favorite flooring material is used in the storage room: OSB, orientedstrandboard. “It looks disoriented to me,” Niemeier laughs, “but it’s great because it’s cheap; you just put it down, sand it and put a finish on top. It doesn’t show anything, because the pattern is so crazy, and it’s got a nice three-dimensional feeling. We’ve used it on walls. It’s just a cool texture. A lot of architecture is about blending textures and colors and light and the flow of the space.”
The other important component of Space’s office is the automatic lighting and audio system, donated by Integration Controls. Niemeier pulls out what looks like a video-game console but is equipped with an electronic rendering of the floor plan, as well as buttons that allow him to control the lighting with a surgeon’s accuracy. Even better, he can program KSHE to blast away in the studio while muting it just below Icon’s reception area.
The final leg of the Space office tour is the low-lit hallway where the company hangs pictures of completed projects. Niemeier insists that photos can’t really communicate the feeling of each project, though, and are a poor substitute for seeing the rooms in person.
Upstairs at Icon, for example, Space built a curvilinear room-within-a-room of strandboard sections slotted into a cedar frame that stands inside the main common area. Looking at the photo, you might make the mistake of thinking that it’s a stylishly unfinished space shot with a fisheye lens. In person, the space looks and feels completely different, depending on the side you’re standing on. Broken into two meeting areas, the “rooms” inside also feature Space-designed glass-top tables; the first was made from a street grating, the second from rebar. “People come in, they sit down and, because it’s a creative use of materials, they know that they’re dealing with creative thinkers,” Niemeier says.
“We definitely lean towards contemporary; we love color. And we like inexpensive materials used in innovative ways—in fact, maybe that should be our tag line.”
