How a Neurodivergent Couple Designed Their Small DIY Amsterdam Home 54sqm 581sqft

We make this house very functional, in a way. It really well reflects what we do and how we move within the house during our days. This is like smaller, but every space is ours. It's like, let's imagine that we are tiny animals and this is our nest. That's how we see it. I'm Pedro, I work in finance and also start-up founder. This is my wife. I'm Asya and I work as an illustrator. And then we have our small dog, which is Lupe. Our baby. We call this house Casa Koala, because that's my nickname. We moved to the Netherlands, I think, six years ago. We bought our first house, we didn't do much. This big pandemic was hitting and we had to work from home, we had to readapt our environment. And that's when we started thinking about, maybe we should buy a new place and just do something new. For us, being in the spectrum, she and I were quite alike in that. The stimulus of color has to be very present. Whatever you surround yourself with has a huge impact on you. Especially on us, because on the whole spectrum thing, what we see when we open our eyes, what we see when we do everyday stuff, it all impacts us and affects us. There's only so many things that you can control and so we wanted to control those things that we actually can change or can decide on. We are in the entrance of our house. We leave our shoes outside most of the time. We have a small drawer. But here we leave our clothes. This is my cabinet. And then we have ashes on this side, which is hats and winter jackets and stuff like that. And all the bags and backpacks. I usually leave all my hats in this cat. You see a pile of hats because I collect cats and of course plants everywhere. And a small mirror because sometimes you want to live and you want to make sure that you don't have anything weird going on. The furniture we also had custom-made to fit well the space, to be very narrow and also to be pretty short. So that once again we do not block the light coming in from the windows. And something, if you see inside, you see that we are hanging vertical, not this way because it has a low profile. So we can put our stuff, like pack a lot without having to occupy like probably 60 centimeters more. This is our kitchen. We designed it to just follow this one shape. We do not have any island, any extra cabinets. When we bought the place, actually the fridge was on the other side and we have a big extractor here and the wall was filled with cabinets. The countertop is actually pretty deep so that we have some extra storage space. We have extra space to work. It's not a big kitchen, but it's comfortable. The countertop, being able to use recycled materials, it was something very important to us. Those are literally pieces of kitchen appliances that were just sent to a landfill, all molded together. Inside we have IKEA kitchen cabinets with the custom-made fronts that add a little bit of texture to the kitchen. This is the dishwasher. That is the storage. This one is tea and some coffee stuff. This one is probably some food. This one is big items like my proteins, my creatine, all this stuff. Also, our kitchenware is very eclectic. We don't buy sets. We just go to somewhere. We also always think about what are the things that we actually need if we really need another plate. Except for mugs. We always need another mug. All of this is old mugs. I only have that mug. That's my mug. But all of the lamps are yours. I'm a lamp guy. Here should be another cabinet. So it all should be fitting perfectly. But the problem is that wall is a tiny bit curved. So we lost this small cabinet that was here. But this fits perfectly here. We have a lot of spices when we cook. There are no gas pipes. So all of this kitchen is electric. The oven is electric. The water purificator is electric as well. Everything that is here is things that we literally use every day. There's a story behind this bin. When we moved here to the Netherlands, the first apartment that we fell in love with, well, you did, I didn't, had exactly this bin. Later on, I spent, I think, two months regretting the place that we lost. We decided to recreate the look. And the first and the only thing that we bought inspired by this first apartment was the yellow bin. It's very old. It should be replaced. But I still have a huge sentiment for it, so it will stay there. This is where we have, like, most of the fun in the house. So every morning, like I said, we have this ritual where I make breakfast. We sit in front of each other, no clutter. Sometimes maybe a phone if we are doing something. But we have a conversation. We have our breakfast, our coffee. And then we go off to work. We always say, this is my spot, and this is your spot. And that's Lupe's spot. We don't have visits often, but we made it so if we have visits, they can sit. Probably six or seven, eight people can sit here. We brought this one from the other apartment, this piece of wood being refurbished. It was a door, and then it was my desk, and now it's, again, my kitchen table. And it's also, once again, perfect because it's narrow and long. It gives us enough space without actually taking it away from us. The legs are new. We like to make kind of different materials because the last house that we had, it was too much wood. So we said, okay, let's bring some color and metal. The whole storage bench situation is actually a very comfortable seating and a lot of storage room. Pedro, doing his research, because that's another thing that he's very good in, he found those children toy boxes that were actually the perfect size. This cushion is this thick to accommodate for the height of the boxes, which aren't that high as we would like them to be. Those are our shoes that we don't use currently, Christmas decoration, once again, Lupe's stuff, and a lot of shopping bags. We decide to some point we get bored, and we can just move them around. This is Lupe's corner where we store all these toys. And she has too many of them. And this is the storage also for her. I have a degree designing spaces and interior architecture and fine arts, but actually the person who took over when organizing and planning this space was Pedro. On the planning, we were sitting together and just trying to figure out the best way. We had the blueprints certified by a professional. This house, when we bought it, was completely different. We did everything from scratch. With some construction guy, we tore the walls down, and then we put everything back together. That was really scary and stressful for me. She's really great at good taste, I would say. Thank you. And she puts me in a direction, and then I start going through the rabbit hole. What does a magazine look like when you jam it full of intoxicating Greekness, dreamlike logic, Compeji's convertible creations, robot-y sculptures, Jaime Hayon's contagious creative compulsions, intimate home portraits from Japan, and Enzo Mari-inspired creatures? Well, it looks like this, and this, and this, this, this, and this. And it includes sexy-as-hell small apartments from Amsterdam, Athens, and Milan too, as well as a spectacular archive of stickers and labels telling stories of design histories. And it also features the 100% definitive and scientifically proven principles of timeless design. Disclaimer, not 100% definitive or scientifically proven. Wait, there's more. There is a salami factory-turned-art museum, and there are very un-kitcheny kitchens, laundries, legacies, mythology, and some seriously hot pots. Oh, my. Get your copy now. This is our living area. It's one of my favorite, if not my favorite part of the house. We have this carpet that is especially to isolate the sound of the floor even further because most of the afternoon we spend together here and watch a movie, so we make sure that it doesn't bother the neighbors. This is a big couch. It's like a bed-sized couch. It came from another house that we have. We didn't change it. Even the sofa was a decision that we made based on how it would make our skin feel. It's very soft to the touch. This is the reading spot. The light is perfect. It's kind of hidden so that it doesn't, you know, bother anyone. It's very simple. It's Ikea. It's just basically here for me to read. This is a nickname she got from me when we met because of my nose. She said, you look like Koala. I'm fine. That was my 43rd birthday. It will deflate and I will probably fold it and keep it as a memento. This is an Ikea. I don't remember who is it. I think it's a Dutch designer, right? This was a very limited edition. It was a run in the European countries. I don't know if anywhere else they had it. This is our kind of picnic blanket that we keep inside. It's a big one. We don't have a balcony, so this is our solution. We just go to the park and organize a small picnic. This is the TV area. I made this custom in a website that does custom furniture. The problem is I forgot to rearrange the ratios, so the actual PlayStation was supposed to be fitting here, but it doesn't fit. You cannot see it, but it's sitting behind. This is a wall that we want to put here for security because I'm very clumsy. The options were like a wood thing or just do glass. Glass doesn't let the space breathe, and this was a perfect solution. This is like a 60 kilos hand-wheeled kind of mesh. We are now in the second floor. I had to rent basically a cable and just myself put it through the windows. There is this option in the Lego store where you can design a little U. There was no Lego head for a man with beard, so I had to paint that on. I had a very vivid dream that I was a ukulele prodigy, so I wanted to get one for myself and see if that's the reality. It's not, but I will keep on trying until I will get there. When we were looking down the stairs from the top, it was all white. In the Netherlands, the stairs are not regular. They are quite steep, so if you look at the white stairs going down, it's quite scary, and we wanted to add some color. It's very soothing. It's very warm. I think we love it. It's one of our favorite parts. Right now, we are in our studio. This is where we work. This is where we spend most of our days. The funny thing, when we moved, this was not here, so I just went and did it. So I bought the wood and I just put it together. It's not perfect. It does its job basically preventing me from falling through the hole. Something that I love about old houses is all those weird little nooks and crannies that you've got, and this is like a little shelf that was already here because all the pipes run through there. This is where all my books basically ended up. All of these construction elements, they weren't visible when we got the space, and we also freed up this window up there because it wasn't visible, so it was illuminating the space that nobody was using. This was before covered, but it was like an attic. We decided to leave that space for storage, which is like a huge space over the bedroom, and we put all our stuff inside. Most of the furniture here is really simple. Sometimes my work can be messy, and I just touch stuff with dirty hands with paint, so we just wanted to have this freedom of if something gets dirty, then it will just stay this way, and we're okay with it. This is where most of my art materials are. There is a lot of sketchbooks, color pencils, cables, computers on the other side. Basically it's like a small art shop. I know that I shouldn't visit one for a very long time because I have everything I could ever need in here. Well, I'm the illustrator behind this book and all of the books that you can see here on the shelves. This is what I do for my work. I always check out the neighborhood trash because people throw out all sorts of things, and sometimes they're really interesting. I found a candle holder. It was just this main shape. It was brown. I sanded it, painted it. My idea was to create a lion or a tiger jumping through the ring of fire. My desk is pretty simple. It's pretty narrow. It's perfect for computer work. This is where I illustrate and draw with my tablet. The desks are the leftovers from the kitchen countertop. All the manual stuff where I do need space and really spread out with all my materials and it might get dirty, I go to the kitchen table. This is where all the rest of my messy stuff is. So all the papers, all the paints. The previous owner asked us if there was anything that we wanted from the previous space that they had here, and the only thing that I chose to keep were the plants. So actually, they've lived here longer than we have. Dutch people are huge. Not compared to me, but literally huge. I think one of the tallest, if not the tallest, people in Europe live in the Netherlands. That means that the stairs have a lot of head space that I don't need and you don't need either. So what we did, we shortened the stairs. So this space is all recovered. This gave us also a good transit that was not here before. You don't have to go all the way around. It doesn't look like much, but it's like one meter extra in Amsterdam is interesting. And it's all the space that we can actually use and we do use it. Here we have the bathroom. We basically redid everything in the house. The only thing that remains from the bathroom is this kind of black thing that I love. We brought these amazing terrazzo panels from Italy. It took us a while. We decided to put the washing machine here. So we designed this cabinet to have it hidden. It's not as chubby as the other one. It's 45 centimeters in depth. This window can be opened this way and also can be a tiny bit opened that way. That's why when we designed this, we didn't make it to reach to this point, otherwise the window would not be able to be open. For this corner, it was quite a challenge. Before, in the old apartment, there was here a small basin and we decided to put a bigger one. We also put what we need on a shelf on the side. This is one of my biggest mistakes and it was making it blue. It gets dirty quite often. The mirror that we put here makes the bathroom feel bigger. Those tiles, the combination of those tiles and the terrazzo and the white was something that we planned ahead for a long time and we had to bring those from, I think those are from Spain because it was the only one that had the actual terracotta color that we wanted. Right in front of the staircase and next to the studio we can go into the bedroom. I think this is actually the simplest room of them all. This is where we did minimal changes to, really. We brought in our very old wardrobes. This is where all of our clothes live. We got them made for our old house. 120 kilos and around 90 kilos of pure wood. This is again a Polish brand that does this furniture. This was coming as is. This one we asked them to break it in half so this was staying in the living room as the same as we have the green one now and those two were in the bedroom. We really wanted a bed with a headboard but because of the slanted walls once again it was hard to find one that would fit the dimensions of the space so we decided finally to paint a small fraction of the wall to serve us visually as a headboard. Pedro said he didn't really have a steady hand when painting it. We decided to finish it with a small trim. And we used double tape to put it. I would prefer to have space under the bed but we opted for extra storage. This is where we keep towels and bed sheets. Without it it would be just harder to store all those things that you do not use every day but you need an easy access to. At the bottom of the bed this is where Lupe sleeps with us. That's her little house. This is a little French balcony situation. This isn't really a balcony you can walk onto and just I don't know enjoy your coffee but it does give you some extra space when we want to open the window and just you know having the nature right outside on this typical dutch patio is actually a very nice situation. This is one of those curtains that are blackout curtains. This detail we bought it for our previous for my previous studio. I think it's original purpose to hang maybe handbags purses jackets on it but right now it works out pretty well as a curtain holder. It's a very small window this one in this case is a single glass. Normally we block it out also so that you know the light in the morning early doesn't come through. Honestly with the old laptop case I don't know if I would call it a hack but it works. Our space is very much ours. All the parts really work. If we cut off one part we will miss it. If I had this room and I remove all the color and the light probably I wouldn't feel comfortable or relaxed. I would maybe feel tense. It's very important for us to see all those small details where we are living and give us comfort.