Interior

Many features participate in the power of 3RW interiors: hues, objects, lights, textures and furniture operate an alchemy of sorts, elevating users’ experience of built space. When designing inside environments, we prioritize simple principles of flexibility, sustainability, beauty and human centeredness.

Careful choices between acts of rebuilding and acts of refurbishing characterize our approach; materials which awaken the senses are emphasised indoors, and the fulfilment of specifications and standards is paired with the ambition of achieving long-lasting qualities. This is shown in the many interior works found in our office portfolio.

Throughout the twentieth century, interior architecture has developed to become an autonomous design discipline in Norway and internationally. Beyond decoration, the discipline requires a deep knowledge of people’s physical experience of buildings; of building elements and their sensory properties. Interior architects at 3RW focus equally on what is seen and what is felt inside a space. To be sure, the way in which individuals use their senses and respond to phenomena links to cultural settings and conditions – our interior works aim to achieve context-sensitivity and inclusivity at once; they are both timely and futureproof. The refurbishments projects of the Landmark Bergen Art Hall and the KODE 1 Museum of Decorative Art reflect well these ambitions.

Collaborative, large-scale realizations like the Ålesund Studentbygg illustrates our comprehensive approach towards interiority. A first overarching concept gets translated into exterior and interior features, ensuring a coherence between all of the project’s tectonic qualities. This represents our attitude towards the architectural status of a project’s interior: as general rule, it should not be conceived separately from the rest of the building. In Ålesund, surfaces and spatial boundaries are softened, contrasted, thickened; the eight floors of the student centre are designed following a set of rules where an array of finishes, furniture and fresh colours specify (and strengthen) different programmatic activities and moods. In addition to digital rendering tools, we regularly utilize sketches, physical models and samples to ensure the value of our interior compositions.

A number of recent interior works at 3RW are conducted within socially-oriented frameworks; pilot programs like ‘Building Dignity’ at the Bergen Inkluderingssenter in Landås, or ‘Future Built’ at the Furuset Hageby elderly home in Northern Oslo demonstrate how we make used of marked humanist principles when deciding on indoor qualities and forms. Interiors are also ‘political interiors’ and ‘public interiors’ – the claim at play is that interior design is more than a spatial arrangement or a collection of objects. As shown with the Landås and Furuset projects, it is also the site of life-shaping encounters, where place attachment, memory and identity are deepest felt. The importance of interiors’ consequences on users’ physical and mental health is intrinsic to all of the office’s architectural concepts.