Inside Festival 2015: Massimo d'Alessandro explains how his studio MdAA transformed an old stable into an apartment by creating a treehouse-like room raised from the floor on a single column (+ movie).

Tree House, which won the Residential category at Inside Festival 2015, is a luxury apartment in Trastevere, Rome, designed by Italian architecture firm MdAA .

Converted from an old abandoned stable, the project gets its name from its unusual raised bedroom, which is supported by a thick column in the middle of the open-plan living room on the ground floor.

"You enter from the door that was the entrance of the stable, just below the treehouse," d'Alessandro explains in our latest movie for Inside Festival.

"You can see in the middle this suspended room, like a treehouse, which is the main bedroom."

The bedroom is reached by a staircase on one side of the living room, which leads to a raised walkway that runs around the perimeter of the space.

Made from black metal, the raised structure also contains a small dressing room and a bathroom. The tilted column supporting it is covered with wood.

"The structure of the treehouse needed to be very rigid," d'Alessandro explains.

"To sustain this kind of dream about the treehouse, the room is raised on only one column, slightly inclined because it's much more friendly than just having a vertical pillar."

The ground floor includes the main living and dining areas, as well as an additional bedroom and bathroom. Natural light is provided through glass doors opening onto a patio on the ground floor. There is also a terrace on the first floor.

D'Alessandro says the clients, a pair of fashion designers, chose to not to furnish their new apartment exclusively with designer furniture.

"If you have a very strong architecture, you can put your grandmother's chairs inside," he says. "You don't need to have everything well designed."

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"They filled the house with a lot of things with memories from their life and they are completely happy with the house."

This movie was produced by Dezeen for Inside Festival. It was filmed at Inside Festival 2015 in Singapore. All photographs are by Nico Marziali unless otherwise specified.

Inside Festival 2015 took place in Singapore from 4 to 6 November, alongside partner event World Architecture Festival. Dezeen is media partners for both events and will be publishing more video interviews with the category winners over the coming weeks.