User:Karagiannakisd/sandbox

= Marta Nowicka =

Marta Nowicka is a Polish-British interior architect, property developer, and academic, known for her award-winning designs in Adaptive Reuse Architecture. Her work encompasses a wide range of projects, including residential and commercial spaces that focus on building re-use and site-specific design solutions.

Early Life and Education
Marta Nowicka was born in London, UK to a first-generation Polish immigrant family. Her father, Leszek Nowicki, was a RIBA architect with his own practice. He was one of the architects on the design team at Ronald Ward & Partners for London’s iconic Millbank complex. Her mother is a fashion designer and owned a boutique in Brompton Road.

Nowicka developed a passion for design from a young age and interned at her father’s firm before attending an art Foundation Course and then Interior Architecture Degree under Fred Scott, Alan Phillips and Ben Kelly at Kingston University. The course was integral in her developing a passion for converting existing buildings to new uses.

She once mentioned in an interview that after her parents divorced, her mother would purchase derelict properties and move in to remodel them and then resell them, which sparked her interest in renovations and property development from early childhood.

Career
Nowicka embarked on her professional journey working for London architectural practices. In 1994, she co-founded her first business Nowicka Stern and co-designed Fabric, Hanover Grand Nightclub, and Cyberia, the first internet café in London. She developed a distinctive conceptual style, drawing inspiration from art, nature, and cultural influences. Then in 2001, shortly after her late husband's death, she decided to sell the company to her business partner to focus on giving birth to their son and start a solo career.

She launched Nowicka & CO in 2003 and introduced clients her new interior design style that focused on a site-specific narrative where her designs which retained details from the original structure. Clients include Karsten Schubert, Gavin Turk, Peter Peri, Michael Landy and Gillian Wearing.

Alongside her client work, Nowicka also did property development. She often discusses the notion that her projects are “like extensions of her family”. As a result, she changed her business model and switched focus for her design consultancy to create DOMstay (originally DOMstay&live), a platform that showcases a tightly edited collection of stylish properties, including her own, that people can rent and stay at.

Notable Projects
Among Nowicka's notable projects is the former St John's Ambulance Station in Rye, East Sussex, into a 4-bedroom home, where she preserved its architectural integrity while introducing modern elements that mixed medieval and medical references. The property was later featured on Channel 4’s Ugly House to Lovely House with George Clarke and has received the AJ Retrofit Award.

Nowicka is also known for the conversion of a 45 sqm garage in Dalston, London, into a 126 sqm three-bedroom home. The Gouse, a combination of the words garage and house, includes a basement cut through by light wells, glass floor and wall sections. The house features cedar shingles and yellow stock brick, designed to improve the street elevation and blend with the end-of-garden surroundings.

Teaching
In addition to her practice as an interior architect and developer, Nowicka is actively engaged in promoting architectural reuse in design education, having a long career within several leading Design and Architecture universities. She began her academic career in 1993 as a Senior Lecturer & Course Coordinator at Birmingham City University and Ravensbourne University as a Visiting Lecturer. In 2003, she became Senior Lecturer at Kingston University, where she had initially studied, and Interior Architecture Course Leader at London Metropolitan University until 2007. Most recently, Nowicka was a Visiting Lecturer at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London.

She has also been invited to examine and lecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, LaSalle College of the Arts, and the London Metropolitan University among others.