De Wachtkamer hacks refugee beds to provide more privacy and dignity
Visitors to Dutch Design Week are invited to consider how the country houses its asylum seekers in a pavilion by De Wachtkamer, a local organisation aiming to improve their living conditions through design.
Located in the Ketelhuisplein square of Eindhoven's Strijp-S creative district, the pavilion bears the same name as the organisation: De Wachtkamer or The Waiting Room.
It showcases the group's first intervention: a plywood cabin system designed to fit over existing bunk beds in the Netherlands' emergency refugee shelters to give the people living there more privacy and dignity.
At the same time, the organisation hopes it will show how easy and inexpensive it can be to give asylum seekers a compassionate and humane reception in Europe.
De Wachtkamer was started by social designer Nanne Wytze Brouwer and architect Anneloes de Koff, who told Dezeen that they had "wanted to do something concrete" to make everyday life better for refugees.
Currently, asylum seekers arriving in the Netherlands are meant to be housed in special centres called AZCs, but because these are over capacity, about half of the 70,000 people entitled to the accommodation are instead living in makeshift shelters set up in locations such as vacant offices and military facilities.
These were not intended for long-term habitation, de Koff says, and often have cramped living conditions, with some bedrooms sleeping up to 12 people and having no natural light.
"We wanted to see how we as architects and designers could improve the living conditions with a very small-scale, bottom-up approach," said de Koff. "We could, of course, design a very utopian, nice new centre and way in which people should be housed, but [these temporary shelters] are the reality."
"So we wanted to see how we can make them a step better and improve them, together with the people."
De Wachtkamer worked closely with architects who had lived experience of seeking asylum in The Netherlands to design its modular plywood system, as well as involving current residents in the process.
The main problem they aimed to address was a lack of privacy in the shelters, where people often live for two years while their claims are processed.
With the crowded living conditions and the open structure of the facilities' metal bunk beds, residents often reported feeling like they could never get a moment alone and would devise DIY solutions, such as draping their clothes and sheets around the beds.
De Wachtkamer's invention involves a plywood shell that fits over the existing bunk bed frames, resulting in a solution that is quick to install and would work at all of the Netherlands' shelters, de Koff says.
It brings practical storage space in the form of cabinets at the ends of the bed and lockable compartments underneath it, along with a concealed shelf in the bedhead for photos, trinkets and other personal objects.
Wood and fabric panelling made from recycled army clothes help to bring visual and acoustic privacy, as does a short, closable curtain made of scrap fabric donated by Danish textile company Kvadrat.
In addition to making the beds more functional and aesthetically pleasing, the shell helps to stabilise the structure, while the addition of a sturdier plywood ladder improves safety.
In De Wachtkamer's pavilion, the plywood cabins are displayed alongside the bare metal bunk beds, so visitors to Dutch Design Week can see the difference for themselves.
They can also see photos of how residents currently live and listen to audio of two of their testimonies, getting to know their personal stories.
The pavilion itself takes the form of an archetypal emergency tent with a simple gabled structure, but it is built out of a prototype waste wood panel called TimberTrix.
The panels are made by Dutch company Herso Circular Woodworkers, which retains ownership of the material using a "wood-as-a-service" model and remains responsible for it even after its use.
De Wachtkamer is currently testing its privacy cabins in the Bleskensgraaf shelter, a former agricultural showroom near Rotterdam that now houses 58 residents.
The shelter is run by the Red Cross, which took over its management on the condition that it could have some budget from the Molenlanden municipality to improve living conditions.
Refugee shelters have been a subject for architects and designers in the past, but usually with camps in the Global South as the target.
Recent contributions have included the Escea flat-pack cooking stove, AllSpace's shelters made from recycled materials and Zaha Hadid Architects' modular classrooms.
Photography by Sofie Lembrechts
Dutch Design Week 2025 takes place from 18 to 26 October 2025 at various locations across Eindhoven, the Netherlands. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.
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