Six windows with rustic white wooden shutters feature in this renovated living room by Dutch designer Bo Reudler.
The residents of the Amsterdam apartment already owned a cabinet from Bo Reudler's Slow White collection, a range of furniture made from tree branches, and asked the designer to style the room around it.
Reudler designed six pairs of shutters to reduce glare from the small square windows, as well as to provide more privacy from the neighbours.
Taking six irregularly shaped planks from a yew tree, the designer used a mix-and-match technique to create each of the panels. Rather than blocking out the light completely, every panel has a crack allows slivers of light to pass through.
Knots in the wood created holes in the planks and are positioned in place of handles.
A table and compass from the Slow White collection were added to the room to complement the cabinet and shutters, alongside the designer's Bamboo Windsor high-back chair, a candle holder from the Haute Bamboo collection and Equus rug, a horse hide with a cutaway Fleur-de-Lis pattern.
See more design by Bo Reudler Studio on Dezeen, including children's furniture shown at Dutch Design Week 2011.
Photography is by Raoul Kramer.
Here's a project description from Bo Reudler Studio:
New Amsterdam interior by Bo Reudler Studio
'There is a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in.' (Leonard Cohen)
For a living room interior in an Amsterdam apartment, Bo Reudler Studio designed six Slow White shutters. The high volume of the space was over flooded with light from six small west-facing windows. The brief called for something to block out glare and at the same time provide privacy from neighbours. The clients already owned a Slow White Cabinet. With this in mind they wondered if the cabinet doors could be translated into something larger: this led to the Slow White shutters.
Using wood as the starting point the aim was not to completely shut out the light but create an interaction with it. By utilising the natural outlines and openings in the wood, each shutter celebrates the material and interacts with the light in a different way. Six planks were selected from a Yew tree native to Western Europe, renowned for its irregular-shaped trunk that produces whimsically shaped planks. The curving natural lines of the planks were mapped like a puzzle to create six pairs of shutters each with their own character. The holes of the knots were positioned as grips for opening and closing. Cracks in the shutters, which are also visible from the exterior, slice the light and admit glimpses of the outside while closed. The shutters bring to the forefront a forgotten building element that was once a common fixture in many homes of the past.
The space is furnished with pieces from the studio including the Slow White table and Golden Compass that highlight the distinguishing curves of natural branches, the Haute Bamboo candleholder and Bamboo Windsor chair, a classic Western chair reinterpreted using the inherent qualities of bamboo and rattan. Resembling oversized lace with its graphic fleur-de-lys pattern cut into the horse hide, the Equus rug initiates an interaction with the floor to either hide it or reveal what's underneath.