1. About the project
How it all started…
Once a upon a time, in a distant kingdom… Oh sorry, a wrong story.
Not a long time ago, about 2 years or so ago, my wife and I were doing some shopping in a furniture story (the one with blue and yellow logo).
Chairs, tables, chests of drawers, you name it. Of course, one wants to see various designs and setups even if you don’t intend to buy anything. At the end, you walk out with big bags anyway – whether it’s a plant pot or a set of dinner plates. Before you realise, it’s lunch time. You don’t need to look far, as the restaurant is just there.
On one of those trips an idea hit us. “Half the world buys self-assembly furniture. Half of this half then goes on assembling the furniture at home. If this suits so many of us, then why not try it at a large scale – where furniture are only cherry on the top in the self-assembly adventure?”
And this is how the idea of creating a house, which only with a little of vigour, anyone can afford. A small to medium sized house, but extremely functional, beautiful and environmentally friendly. But most importantly, a house that doesn’t require all that hassle of securing building permissions or hiring expensive and unreliable construction crews.
The key advantage of our design is the opportunity to assemble the light building blocks yourself. The core construction material used is high-quality impregnated wood, tested in Scandinavian weather conditions.
Our mission is to enable people like you to have their own (first?) house. A house in which you will feel happy and safe.
Mipikon produces small to medium sized but elegant wooden houses, built using modern construction technology and of elegant architecture look and feel.
2. Our Team
Piotrek Miczko
Building construction enthusiast and lecturer. Husband and a father to two very lively children. A great fan of hiking, cycling and kayaking. Born with keen interest for ergonomics in design of compact spaces – attempting amateur interior and exterior design of yachts already in primary school (to his teacher’s despair!). In the end, instead of becoming a famous ship architect, Piotrek graduated with masters in land construction, with dissertation in wooden constructions – spiritus movens of Mipikon project.
Piotrek currently teaches at secondary technical school of construction and is a lecturer at a university in Kalisz, Poland.
Michał Morzykowski
A master of many talents – jujitsu, furniture design and interior design. He has a flair for combining various construction materials and dividing interior spaces, giving them a fresh and stylish look while keeping them functional. He can talk about interior design for hours. In his free time, Michał signs “Let it go” from Frozen with his adorable daughter. She is much better at it that him and we hope that Michał just sticks to the interior design which is his true forte.
His eager to help and enthusiastic approach to people give everything that he touches a positive spin.
Kasia i Charlie Dean
A Polish-Chinese-English blend. Our team tasked with translations to those less and more foreign languages out there.
Kasia works for a large technology and strategy consulting firm in London, and in her free time hikes up Machu Picchu in Peru or dances tango at Argentinian milongas.
Charlie is a Leonardo da Vinci type of person – a mechanical engineer by education, an engineering designer in medical and pharmaceutical world by trade. If you need something– he will build it for you. His holds a frequent flyer badge for routes between Kalisz, London and Singapore.
3. Our guiding principles
- Functionality of the building and rooms
Without ensuring functionality of rooms, daily activities become more troublesome. In order to avoid this, our designs follow the rule of sequence based ergonomics. This involves understanding the activities undertaken in each room and the order in which take usually occur. For example, in the kitchen it looks as follows:
- You enter the kitchen with bags full of shopping;
- You place the bags on the kitchen counter;
- You then take the shopping out of the bags and put it in the fridge;
- When you want cook, you take the food out of the fridge and put it on the kitchen counter;
- You wash the vegetables in the sink, peel some carrots and put them into a pot;
- You put the pot on the cooker/ in the oven;
- You take the pot off the cooker/ out of the oven and put it on the kitchen counter.
So from the kitchen counter to an electric appliance, back to kitchen counter etc… This is how we design the water access or plugs.
- Intuitiveness and ease of installation
If the installation is challenging, you would require a highly specialised building crew to help. Luckily, Mipikon bets on intuitive design – individual elements are precisely cut out, while the building sets include easy-to-follow assembly instructions. Building a Mipikon house is a pure pleasure.
- Modular construction
If your or your family needs change, you can add an extra module to your existing Mipikon house at any point. Equally, if you decide that you want a change of scenery and live elsewhere, you can simply disassemble the house and then assemble it back again in a different location.
- Ecology and saving materials
You can read about it here: http://www.mipikon.com/en/ecology/