Sometimes a new floor treatment is all you need to renovate a Baroque beauty like the Kunstmin Theater in Dordrecht, the Netherlands. In refreshing the interiors, Studio Makkink & Bey, working with Greiner van Goor Huijten Architects, looked downwards and re-imagined the ground underneath the feet of the theatre’s patrons.
They devised a pixelated carpet tile pattern that provides a modern counterpoint to the marble flourishes and voluptuous mouldings that distinguish this building, originally designed by Jan Verheul and Sybold van Ravesteyn. The repeated lines and colours of the floor tiles are echoed in the new colours injected into the public spaces, including the kitchen and the foyer. For more pops of contemporeneity, they furnished the interiors with their colourful seating systems and other quirky pieces. In the cafeteria, they reassembled the plank flooring in an exuberant pattern, to conjure a sense of movement and excitement.