Night Kitchen is a design research studio based in London and Athens, run by Drs Dream and Liangi. The studio explores the intersections of architecture, collecting and storytelling through an engagement with the picturebook format, challenging conventional boundaries between fact and fiction, object and narrative, and the real and the imagined.

Their engagement with postmodern picturebook theory is not merely aesthetic but methodological. Drawing on scholarship that positions picturebooks as complex, multimodal texts, Night Kitchen treats the format as a spatial device capable of compressing time, layering realities and interweaving the verbal and the visual. The imagery of their books often contains books within books, or spreads that depict the process of their own making, creating recursive loops between fiction and documentation, allowing for an exploration of architecture not as a fixed discipline but as a mutable and storied practice.

Their work explores the boundaries between fiction and material culture. This approach draws inspiration from figures like Sir John Soane and Maurice Sendak, whose curated environments served as engines of imagination and meaning-making. Like these precedents, Night Kitchen’s home-archive is not a static repository but a generative space, where collected objects and ephemera are recontextualised through speculative architectural imagery and narrative experimentation.

As educators, Dream and Liangi bring these themes into the design studio, encouraging students to use narrative strategies to explore identity, memory and heritage. Whether through speculative publications or the reimagining of domestic spaces as sites of fiction, Night Kitchen’s work invites audiences to see architecture as a medium of enchantment and critique—where objects are not only remembered but reimagined.