We designed a kitchen for a couple who love cooking and love good food.

The kitchen has a concrete worktop, unique CNC-milled handles and integrated LED lighting. The design is deliberately simple and consistent, and with a touch of Bauhaus.

In Schiedam’s main shopping street, more than a third of the property is vacant. This is not unique to Schiedam, many cities have the problem of empty shop premises.

Hoogstraat Hotel aims to transform these vacant -renovated- shops into stylish and comfortable hotel rooms. The solution consists of adding flexible elements such as a pantry, bathroom and toilet. If a tenant comes forward, these elements can easily be removed and reused in another location.

The rooms have themes linked to Schiedam’s history, industry and creativity. The archives of the Jenever Museum and the Municipal Archives, among others, are a rich source. All the art and accessories in the rooms are made, designed or made available by Schiedam artists and entrepreneurs and give the rooms identity. The hotel rooms thus literally become shop windows for Schiedam’s makers.

Hoogstraat Hotel is an initiative in collaboration with Manifesta Idee en Ontwerp.

Presentation [PDF, Dutch]

An old secondary school closed a few years ago. After a presentation by Urban Village, the city council of Ede wanted to explore the possibility of housing refugee families in the empty classrooms.

Each classroom houses a family with children in a two-room apartment with its own kitchen and bathroom. The aim was to make the conversion cheap and flexible, but at the same time provide a home for people who had to flee their own homes because of war.

Presentation [PDF, Dutch]

Make a proposal for design and execution for the side wall of the Fenixloods, which is at the same time an art expression and makes the Katendrecht information centre findable.

We designed an architectural route. A staircase through the scaffolding construction leads the visitor to the roof. There he walks – with stunning views over the river Maas – to the viewing tower around the flagpole. Photos of Katendrecht and its residents are displayed with augmented reality. The smartphone as binoculars to the past, present and future.

Fenixloods design [PDF]

studioMERZ designed and supervised the renovation of two entrance halls of an apartment complex. The concept is Open House, the entrance hall as the living room of all residents.

Materials and lighting were taken to a higher level, giving the spaces a more luxurious and warm feel. A place you want to come home to. Entrance 1 has a large reading table and a library where residents share books with each other. The smaller second entrance has a seating area by the window and plants.

By consistently using simple but sustainable materials and clever details, the project was realised within budget despite the high level of finishing.

This project is an architectural research into the beauty of impermanence.

The Factory in Delfshaven, Rotterdam. A ruin becomes a collective building with a bar, restaurant, a theatre and a cinema, 8 hotel rooms and retail and office spaces.

The concept is to reuse the building through minimal (!) renovation. With decay as an essential part of the identity.

The beauty of impermanence [PDF]

Basement [PDF]
Street level [PDF]
First floor [PDF]
Second floor [PDF]
Section-AA [PDF]
Section-BB [PDF]

In the city centres of some Polish towns, demolished buildings leave empty areas awaiting new development. These spots are simply abandoned, fenced off or used as car parks.

studioMERZ has developed a concept to use these empty areas during the interim, to attract people instead of shutting them out. Container City adds value to these places and it shows change and progress instead of stagnation and decay.

Container City Łódź [PDF]
Container City Katowice [PDF]

The old bathroom is tall, but the walls are in poor condition, crooked and none of the corners are square. Therefore, the new bathroom was designed as a box placed freestanding in the existing space. This way, it was relatively easy to create a completely new bathroom, with pipes and drains simply concealed.

The plywood walls and floor were treated with an almost black coating that contrasts with the stuccoed white walls. The cast-iron down pipe was kept in sight as a historical element.

Dura Vermeer asked studioMERZ to design an exhibition stand for Concrete Day. The concept: A day at the construction site. The design was a 5 metre high formwork made of concrete plywood in a scaffolding, with a printed weave of rebar on the floor. The bar of the coffee corner was made of scaffolding planks with a print of the Amsterdam north-south line under construction on the wall.

Together with the carpenters of Lignum Vitae we created an original and unusual exhibition stand that was much talked about.