Background
After all graduating from Nottingham Trent University, the five senior partners of Minimal Management all went their separate ways.
Daniela finished her masters at University of Sheffield and worked in Birmingham, London and Luxembourg. She won a few competitions, in which she developed her own style, which she widely inputs in her design ideas at Minimal Management.
Vinanti had her masters at Brighton School of Architecture. She has a wide experience in photography and interior design, which she uses to her benefit in the company’s projects.
Fehintola finished her masters at University of Nottingham. She worked in Switzerland and Nigeria, with quite challenging environments and tasks. This offered her the chance to see design from a strict objective point of view, one of the key aspects of Minimal Management.
Aaron worked in practices in Lincoln and Birmingham, being widely concerned with the financial part of the projects.
Nicholas gained experience in project managing during his work around Cheshire.
Then in 2018 they all reunited and opened their own practice, Minimal Management.
Experience
Minimal Management has already managed to finish a few projects. The team mainly refurbishes old buildings, and deals with challengingly small spaces, making them habitable.
Awards
British Inspiration Awards for ‘Hilary and Tony’s Loft’ project in 2018
RIBA East Midlands Awards for ‘The Hundred Year Old Flat’ project in 2019
Philosophy
Since the beginning of time, people have tried to build themselves shelters that would strictly meet their necessary requirements. Throughout history, the idea of a shelter was decorated more and more, and it turned into a symbol of wealth. But with the exponential growth of the population, there was less and less space to be inhabited. So people developed a trend of creating smaller living spaces that would fit the minimal human requirements, thus lowering the cost and space of their shelters, but maximizing its functionality.
Minimal Management tries to develop designs that strip the dwelling unit of all the unnecessary details, leaving only the main functions of the house, to create comfort and coziness for each individual client.
Ethos and style
The place where you live has to be as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Minimal Management takes the carcass of an old building, making use of its steadiness and historical importance, and places new individual minimal designs within its parameters.
Consultants
The practice keeps in touch with professional organizations, like RIBA and CIAT, to keep up with the newest standards, guidelines and codes. They also communicate with co-professionals, such as civil engineers, designers, technologists, etc. in order to make sure their designs work steadily. They are also guided by bank managers and accountants, in order to keep the financial situation under control.
Relationship with Institutions
The company is closely observed by RIBA and CIAT. Being a fairly new business, they are open to any guidelines and key observations, in order to improve their practice.
Client interaction
The Minimal Management team puts its clients’ wishes first. They do have set points that guide their designing scheme, but they try to make it as customizable as possible. They listen to what the customer wants, then develop a couple of sketches based on the initial discussion, they give their best advice on how to go on with each sketch, and then develop further the idea that the client chooses.
Awareness of technology
Our company specializes in refurbishing and repurposing old, abandoned buildings. Most of the time we work with former industrial or commercial buildings, giving them a new residential purpose. The concept behind it is to keep the historical value and spirit of the building and its surroundings, but acknowledging that population's needs change throughout time.
As the city grows, it reaches a point when the only direction to expand is vertically. Based on that and combined with our HiConsumption concept, one of our future projects describes a vertical city. It consists of creating modular minimal units. customizable to our clients' needs, that can be attached to a common core that will provide all the necessary resources. These units will be able to be attached to an already existing standing structure, which maximizes the efficiency of the design.
Specialisms
Design by Daniela Carpov​
This is where you’re actually taking an existing building and you’re repositioning its function. Where we take a building repurpose it for use that is popular and needed in today’s Marketplace. And the reason for that is first of all, we have a huge amount of existing building stock and we need to be smarter about using it.
Particularly if you look at the older buildings, they have wonderful bones from a design perspective. They have high floor-to-floor ceiling heights that allow us to bring in a lot of natural daylight. It allows for good circulation systems, it allows you to optimize how you set up your lighting systems.
And of course, the buildings themselves are pretty strong, sturdy buildings. They've been around so long and they have a lot of materials in them and you want to take advantage of that.
Also, buildings in particular that were built in the earlier part of the century were designed to optimize their performance in what we call the passive state. That is, being able to take advantage of solar orientation and wind and natural ventilation because we didn't have such reliance that we do now on mechanical systems for our comfort. So they're very smartly designed buildings.
The only thing is that they're use or what they were originally designed for is no longer needed. And so what you now want to do is say how can I take this building that's, for example, plunked down in the middle of a city, an old manufacturing plant, and take advantage of it because we need housing or we need offices or we need hotels. And can we use these buildings to provide that function?
How is adaptive reuse different? Or is it different?
It's part of the whole package. What you do want to have from a green perspective, sustainability perspective, to really make your cities or any area environment, you need to have good density and you need to have mixtures of uses.
Infill is a situation where you already have low density and you're trying to increase the density. In the case of brownfield redevelopment, you've had industrial activities that have contaminated the surrounding environments and you need to clean them up. And unfortunately, in many cases, that means you have to bring down the buildings themselves because they've been quite contaminated and you have to address the underlying soils.
In the case of adaptive reuse, you've got a building, you've got good bones, but its use doesn't really fit with what's growing up around it and so you can modify that by again saying, well, what do we need here? Are we in an area that's heavily commercial and maybe we need to have more housing? Are we in an area that is heavy in residential, but potentially we need more market space or we need more retail, or we need more entertainment space, and can we use buildings for that purpose?
The other thing, too, what you're looking at from an adaptive reuse perspective is saying, if we really want to do something about our energy consumption and we really want to do something about the carbon issue, we have to get, we have to improve the performance of the existing building stock big time. And by going into an existing building, adapting its reuse, improving its performance, being smarter about how you manage — for example, manage daylight and provide thermal comfort, we can significantly reduce the energy consumption associated with the operating of that building as well.
The team keeps in touch with specialists in the IT department, in order to make sure they have the latest software to work with. They also are constantly advised by civil engineers, who tell them about newest updates in the world of construction. That allows the practice to expand its possibilities in terms of new ideas and lets the clients have a wider range of customizable designs.
Services
Handouts
Business Cards
