It's not easy making a 400-square-foot guest house feel roomy, but owner-architect and designer Emma Pereira was up for the challenge.
From the outside, Atelier Lumi looks like a neat, well-appointed apartment; it's not until you step inside that its considerable gifts reveal themselves.
"Japan, as a leader in the field of the small-house lifestyle, has very innovative visual techniques to make these tiny spaces appear roomier," Pereira told domino magazine. She used those principles — including incorporating multipurpose appliances and built-in furniture as much as possible — to craft a space that feels airy despite its small footprint.
With double-height ceilings and the bedroom lofted above the kitchen with modular spiral staircase access, Pereira used a series of windows and mirrors to sculpt light along with generous interior curves that give the space a gentle, inviting feel.
The unique composition of the space, with its various curves and angles in an otherwise tight box, made it a prime candidate for showing off the strengths of the new Leica BLK360 Imaging Laser Scanner — and the benefits of 3D laser scanning in general.
"I chose [Atelier Lumi] because it's right on the edge of the Miami Design District, and I liked the high ceilings and beams," Corey Weiner, principal and founder of c2a.studio, an on-site as-built laser scanning service for architects, interior designers, builders, and engineers, told Leica Geosystems. "And it's an Airbnb, so I just booked a night, but I probably spent 30 minutes in there scanning — about 10 scans to capture the whole thing."
From a technical standpoint, Weiner said he was impressed with the scanner's precision, which outperformed its stated 4 mm accuracy at 10 meters.
"My accuracies are like a millimeter to a millimeter and a half almost out of the box," he said.
For Weiner, whose as-built laser scanning service requires precision and speed, that's a welcome development.
Lumi also highlights the strengths that 3D laser scanning has over traditional surveying methods.
"The old way, whether it was high-end architects working on mansions or a traditional, down-to-earth guy who's redesigning a 2000-square-foot apartment, they're measuring the same way. They've got tape measures and notepads," he explained. "Say you have a curved ceiling: There's a zero percent chance of getting within a half inch on the curve. You have to be a geometry expert."
When I tell clients, they're like, 'Well, this place we're going to hire you for has a lot of strange angles and curves. I'm like, 'The scanner doesn't care.'
That's a fact that's evident in the scans of Atelier Lumi, with its sloping curves and hard angles captured with equal ease — a boon for architects and designers alike.
"It doesn't matter if it's Sagrada Familia and if it's got all kinds of organic shapes," Weiner said. "I could scan that just as accurately as a box."
