ABSTRACT
This chapter provides auto-ethnographic fieldnotes and reflections on Felicity Atekpe’s design methodology. Atekpe’s architectural practice, White Table, uses unusually collaborative methods to create everyday domestic spaces and moods with their clients. Drawing on poetic, pictorial, and filmic mood creation, White Table’s consultation and design process is deeply interdisciplinary and sensory. The chapter firstly outlines how visual culture references, aid in the early discussions with clients to capture desired moods, and secondly, how cinematographic and artistic techniques for manipulating light and space are ultimately used to materialize those moods. In particular, the creation of domestic mood is broken down into five key elements or ‘mood makers’, which are: space, light, materials, landscape and atmosphere. Focusing on each of these elements individually, the chapter provides personal reflections on the design process and key insights into this unique, collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to the architecture of the everyday.
