Photographs by Ida Magntorn
Total Budget: “About 800 quid.”
Designer: Bobby Petersen, 29, product designer, Royal College of Art graduate.
When Bobby Petersen set out to completely overhaul this 520-square-foot loft in the Seven Sisters neighborhood of North London—with a budget of around 800 pounds—he needed to be resourceful. He combed the curbs of nearby factory buildings, gathering discarded scaffolding boards to construct his kitchen island. He dismantled a shelf (which awkwardly divided the apartment in two) and transformed it into a work-and-dining table. Even the passion-fruit vines, which twist up the kitchen wall, were salvaged. “I found a little fruit on the street and put it in my pocket. I totally forgot about it, reached in a week later, and pulled out some mush and seeds. I took those seeds and planted them.” Then there’s the platform with a built-in desk that protrudes over the kitchen—workspace for a roommate who moved in after the renovation and split the rent for the first year. “I wanted to give him some desk space and to establish a different height over the kitchen.” As for the lofted master bedroom, Petersen built it from scratch using a drill, a handsaw, and a hammer. “That was more or less it,” he says. The big blue door is lowered and raised via a suspended weight that hangs by the couch. “You can be up there, and it feels like you’re sitting in a tree house. In a way, it’s quite childish.”
Photo: Ida Magntorn
Photo: Ida Magntorn
Jamel Lewis (left) West 145th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Lewis, a 21-year-old security guard, was hit on November 30, 2006, by a private sanitation truck. Franco Scorcia West 40th Street and Broadway. On December 6, 2007, 72-year-old Scorcia was returning home from Central Park when he was hit by a charter bus making a right turn.