The Urban Nomad Home Kit, designed by Royal College of Art (RCA) graduate Barbara Peynot, is a series of flexible wearable objects that transform to become a home interior for the urban nomad. The kit consists of a coat that unzips to become an interior enclosure, complete with a window and wallpaper and lit up by a hood that transforms into temporary lampshade.
Peynot’s project is a flexible and mobile approach to interior design, where the home is detached from the architectural frame. It explores the very personal and intimate space that directly surrounds the body, therefore considering clothing and furniture as the first layers that create a home around the individual.
Most of the time we are given briefs from an existing architectural shell but I wanted to push the idea that an interior does not have to be attached to architecture but instead it can start from body.
The inspiration for the Urban Nomad Kit came when Peynot was working in a studio at RCA. “We shared a studio with the women’s wear department,” she says. “I was always going over to the fashion side to see how they make things. Especially the processes, they were so fast, one day they were drawing it and the next making it.”
The other components of the kit include a dual performing backpack, a suitcase and a scarf. The backpack flips into folding stool while its interior tote sac transforms into a carpet. The suitcase becomes a small closet and coffee table workspace topped off with homely tablecloth engraving. And lastly, the scarf unravels to become a partially inflatable mattress and somewhere to rest.
Peynot’s graduate project seeks to reconcile contrasted ideas of permanence and mobility by proposing wearable and portable interiors for the Urban Nomads. It imagines an ensemble of hybrid objects recreating an interior space that would adapt to changing environments. The Urban Nomad Home Kit plugs in and out of existing interiors and can be packed, unpacked and repacked at will. Worn and carried while travelling, it transforms into interior elements in times of grounding, providing a continuous homely feeling through the journey.
