“Das Haus” 2019 stunned audiences with its elegance and ease

Room to breathe, space for action, room for small escapes and a place for sleeping half hidden behind rotatable panels: this is what “Das Haus” by Studio Truly Truly presented at imm cologne 2019. Australian designers Kate and Joel Booy demonstrated their self-confidence and artistic sensitivity in their take on a residential home for the design event: their open-plan living concept created a stunning sight with its strong colours, fine details and well-proportioned open spaces. It was a “Haus” with nothing superfluous that did not illustrate their concept of “living by moods”, and yet their design was far from being stark or cool.

The designers did away with fixed partition walls, replacing them with zones skilfully attuned to each other. It was an atmosphere that made anyone entering “Das Haus” feel instantly at ease. Soft furnishings for the walls, the floorings and bed, solid kitchen blocks and heavy furniture, new prototypes and old classics, lighting and accessories, design objects and art all came together to form a groundbreaking blueprint for interior design that represents a new generation of home living.

“As trained graphic designers, we make a real point of ensuring that the things we design communicate. With this project we had the rare opportunity to work with everything that makes interior design and to see how the furniture, lighting and textiles interact,” says Joel Booy. “And as we personally see our home as a place of tranquillity, that’s what we wanted to make ‘Das Haus’ as well.”

And they succeeded. The kitchen was the starting point for their design, because it has always been the focal point of social life. Fascinated by the kitchen’s colours, they juxtaposed the vivid yellowy-green of the tiles with brushed stainless steel and the soft yellow shades of the heavy upholstery fabric enveloping the whole house. The coolness of the semi-transparent, half-mirrored glass room partition was absorbed by its warm plum red.

Active, the dominant zone, encompassed a kitchen broken down into several solid blocks, a kitchen counter that descended into a bench, a large, multifunctional table and a generous seating group gathered not around a television set but an imaginary panoramic window. The Reclining area was dominated by rounded shapes and slightly darker shades. On the other side of the model home, a wall of plants reaching several metres high formed the circular Reclusive area. It provided a kind of enclosed garden where one can retreat for a quiet moment’s reflection or come together for more intimate family gatherings. The sheltered, slightly dimly lit space gave rise to a very special mood, one that the sight of the natural, slow rhythm of the plants was designed to strengthen. To conclude there was Serene, formed of a gently illuminated bathing area and a space separated by rotating Viennese rattan screens – not much larger than the new solid- wood bed that filled it.

“How and where people work, eat, and consume entertainment today is becoming more and more fluid, and the boundaries between these different activities continue to blur,” says Kate Booy. Her husband, Joel, adds: “Our vision of the home is not about efficiently accomplishing a lot of tasks but rather breaking away from the demands of the outside world and finding your own rhythm. It’s about consciously taking time for mundane activities and giving them the value of something worthwhile.”

With their “Haus” Studio Truly Truly combined a sensibility for interior design with an instinct for high quality craftsmanship. The design duo’s love of the materials that they work with was clear in their vision. Glass and wool, wood and metal were bathed in the unique lighting that Studio Truly Truly skilfully staged with a further development of the Typography Lighting System (Rakumba). The materials exuded a charm that visitors could not resist. They didn’t just take photographs; they felt, patted and stroked. “Das Haus” may have been made from the fine materials, but it was still a blueprint of a home that visitors could behold, try out and touch. However you feel, this is living by moods.