How can we create stronger student accommodation projects with multi-disciplinary collaboration?
In September last year, LHC Design was asked to produce an Interior Design concept for an exuberant, all-encompassing student accommodation in the coastal city of Swansea.
In response to the brief, LHC Design’s Graphic and Interior departments adopted an enlivened perspective consistent with the collaborative company’s ethos of developing beautiful, intelligent, and sustainable design schemes, with the idea crafted through careful consideration of the uniqueness of the client, users, and place.
The design team came up with the name ‘Copr’ (Welsh), which applauds Swansea’s rich cultural heritage and its historic significance within the global Copper industries. Both the interior and graphics for ‘Copr’ invite student residents to feel at home with elements of their own culture, heritage, and sense of self through honest, playful, and escapist design messages and connections with communities and cultures outside of their own experience.
For instance, the Interior Design team devised an optimistic interpretation of Swansea’s often rainy climate by adding pastel splashes of suspended umbrellas above the communal ground floor, allowing residents to briefly experience Southern Italian café culture. Inspired by the arrival of Italian gelato to the seafront of Wales. While the Graphics team explored how copper could epitomise the scheme by using Heritage tones, paired with vibrant secondary colours, to form a diverse and adaptable palette, which then fed back to the interiors by energising the scheme and softening it where necessary, such as in the Global Lounge and Spa facilities.
The attached images show the different mediums used by the team to explore and communicate design concepts even at the early stages, including hand drawing and CGI.
View the presentation slide deck and concept flythrough animation of the arrival to the ‘Croeso’ zone, where residents are greeted by playful huts that resemble the mountainous Brecon Beacons.
