A resident of an apartment development walks through the entrance hall, the lift lobby and the parking level every day they live in the building, and can change none of them. Those spaces carry as much of the perceived quality as the residences do. In many projects nobody owns them as interiors at all.
Fourteen of them appear on the list we quote from. When we price the visualisations for an apartment development, each residential typology takes four to ten frames and each shared space takes one or two: the entrance hall, the concierge desk, the lobby, the lift lobby, the pool, the sauna, the gym, the cinema, the wine cellar, the cigar room, the meeting room, the children’s room, the mini-golf and the parking. Fourteen shared spaces against two or three typologies. The list is not a menu of extras. It is the route a resident takes from the street to their own front door, written out in order.
A car comes down the ramp at eleven in the evening, the driver still on a call. They park, lift the bags out of the boot and walk to the lift. Every part of that walk was decided by somebody: the level of light and its colour, the floor, and whether the lift lobby continues the language of the building or announces that the money stopped at the front door.
On a good night none of it registers. That is the point of getting it right, and it is also why the work is the easiest thing in a development to cut from a budget.
Because of where they sit in the packages. The residences belong to the interior designer, the structure and the envelope to the architect, and the parking level, the stair cores and the corridors fall into the builder’s scope by default. Nobody is asked to design them. The finishes that arrive are whatever the contractor already buys in volume. The same failure, read from the sales side, is the fifth of the five mistakes that slow an off-plan sale.
How it is prevented: the common areas and amenities sit inside our core scope for a development, alongside the design concept, the working documentation, the custom pieces and the photoreal visualisation. They are drawn on the same set as the residences and priced with them at the point the scope is fixed, before anyone has a reason to drop them.
At the seams between packages. Two floor finishes meeting at a lift threshold because two teams specified them a year apart. A corridor lit at one colour temperature opening into a lobby lit at another. Door furniture in the parking lobby from a different family to every handle upstairs. Each is small on its own. Read along a single walk, they tell a buyer the building was assembled by people who were not speaking to each other.
On the same set as everything else. Wall elevations, suspended-ceiling plans, tile and parquet layouts and furniture installation plans, dimensioned throughout and detailed far enough for a workshop to quote and build from. We draw the electrical and climate schemes for the interior. Sizing and calculation stay with the project engineer.
Where site supervision is in scope, the built work is checked against the approved design. In a lift lobby that means checking the three things easiest to substitute quietly on site: the light fitting, the floor finish and the fixing detail nobody photographs.
Something to show. The frames on the shared spaces are handed over with the rest of the visualisation files and go into the sales material. A buyer standing in a sales office looking at a lift lobby is being shown the part of the building they will use every day and cannot change after completion. What a developer decides is whether there is anything there to look at.
In a finished building the parking level is often the first interior anyone meets and the last one anybody drew. Reversing that order costs a set of drawings and no concrete.
More than a decade of residential work, from the studio in Palma de Mallorca.
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