We want to tell you our wonderful news! Our shared dream of a Home for Teenage and Newly Independent Mothers and their Children just entered its first phase of implementation and we have a plan drawn up for this exceptional place. The plan was drawn up by the WXCA architectural firm. Their architects poured their hearts into the work and came up with many great solutions. The home is tailor-made for the needs of its future residents with a focus on all the details facilitating the day-to-day lives of mothers with young children.
The plan shows a two-storey house. The building is in principle made up of two wings. The northern one is a private zone with two apartments and the eastern one is a common area. The day room is in between them.
The interior is made up of interlinked zones:
- Common areas
These have an entrance and auxiliary rooms. The entrance has a cloakroom, a stroller room and a hallway. The auxiliary rooms have a shared toilet, boiler room, store room and laundry room.
- Private area
There are two apartments, each with a kitchen and bathroom near the bedrooms. The apartment’s day room downstairs, due to the layout, is near the middle of the home and has an area for adults to rest in but also for meetings, training, art or therapeutic activities, and a children’s area with soft flooring to help them have fun. The kitchen area has a kitchen and dining room, a pantry and utility room. It extends outdoors onto a large patio looking west with space for a dining table and with a view onto the playground. It also gives access to an allotment where the vegetables grown can be collected and food waste composted as fertiliser.
The sleeping area downstairs has four rooms for the mothers and children and looks northward, and there is access to the garden from the rooms. Upstairs there is a smaller apartment with two rooms for mothers and children and a carer’s room with an en suite bathroom and a small living room with a kitchen.
The layout put forward provides an economical use of the area, spacious and easy-to-arrange rooms, and a common area which is essential for communal living.
Furthermore, the windows and skylights provide a nice view and above all fill more functional areas with enough light to create a cosy atmosphere inside a home adapted to the daily rhythm.
The free space around the building has been made use of to create varied functional gardens and a space to rest in.
To the south the expanded part of the garden has been converted into a small children’s playground. The rest of the area around the building (apart from the eastern side) is planned around the planting of shrubs, herbs and grass to make a recreational green area in the project. The area to the east of the home is intended to have a small functional garden for growing food and possibly also small greenhouses on the ground so that when the young mothers are making meals they can leave the kitchen to collect fresh herbs and vegetables.
We still really NEED YOUR SUPPORT so we can begin construction of this special place as soon as possible in the new year.
We are creating this as a partner to the po DRUGIE Foundation which has for years been working to bring tailor-made help to young people.