Marta Nowicka's DOM Studio: A Sustainable Retreat Born from Waste
In an era where the design world is increasingly scrutinising its relationship with consumption and material waste, London-based designer Marta Nowicka has put her principles into striking, tangible practice. Her self-designed studio retreat, known as DOM Studio, sits among the windswept dunes and coastal marshlands of Camber Sands in East Sussex — and it was built almost entirely from waste materials. The project is a rare and compelling example of a designer turning their professional philosophy into a deeply personal living and working space, demonstrating that sustainability and beauty are not only compatible but mutually reinforcing.
What Is DOM Studio?
DOM Studio is Marta Nowicka's self-designed creative retreat located at Camber Sands, a village on the East Sussex coast of England known for its expansive sandy beach and dramatic natural landscape. The name "DOM" — the Polish word for "home" — reflects Nowicka's Polish heritage and underscores the deeply personal nature of the project. This is not simply a professional showcase or a design experiment; it is a home, a working studio, and an expression of Nowicka's values as a designer committed to circular thinking and material honesty.
The studio functions as a retreat from the bustle of London, offering Nowicka a space for creative work and rest, while standing as a practical manifesto for sustainable design. Every material decision within the space carries intention, and very little of what makes up the interior arrived new from a shop shelf or manufacturer's catalogue.
The Philosophy Behind the Design: Waste as a Resource
At the core of DOM Studio's design philosophy is a simple but radical proposition: waste materials are not a problem to be managed but a resource to be celebrated. Nowicka sourced reclaimed, salvaged, and discarded materials to construct and furnish the space, treating the limitations imposed by working with found objects not as constraints but as creative opportunities.
This approach is increasingly relevant in contemporary design discourse. The construction and interiors industry is one of the world's largest producers of waste, and the linear model of take-make-dispose has come under sustained criticism from designers, architects, and environmental advocates alike. Nowicka's DOM Studio offers a lived, photographed, and visible alternative — proof that rigorous aesthetic standards do not require new production.
Working with waste materials demands a different design process to conventional interiors work. Rather than specifying materials and waiting for them to arrive, the designer must be opportunistic, adaptable, and deeply knowledgeable about material properties. Nowicka's background in furniture and product design positions her well for exactly this kind of hands-on, material-led thinking.
Camber Sands: A Landscape That Shapes the Design
The location of DOM Studio is far from incidental. Camber Sands occupies a particular place in the English coastal imagination — raw, windswept, and strikingly beautiful, with dune systems, grazing marshes, and the English Channel providing a shifting backdrop of light and texture. The landscape exerts a powerful influence on the studio's character, with Nowicka drawing on the muted, earthy tones of the surrounding environment to inform her material and colour palette.
The coastal setting also reinforces the project's ecological dimension. Camber Sands sits within a sensitive natural environment, and a design approach rooted in reuse and low environmental impact feels especially appropriate in such a setting. The studio does not seek to impose itself on its surroundings but to exist in quiet dialogue with them.
Self-Design as an Act of Creative Courage
One of the most striking aspects of DOM Studio is that Nowicka designed it herself, for herself. Self-design — the practice of a designer creating their own living or working space — is both a privilege and a particular kind of pressure. Without a client brief to shape decisions, every choice is entirely the designer's own, and the result becomes an unusually direct reflection of their values, tastes, and convictions.
For Nowicka, this freedom appears to have produced a space of considerable authenticity. The studio is reportedly neither precious nor performative, but warm, functional, and deeply considered. Working with waste materials adds another layer of personal investment: each salvaged piece has been chosen, adapted, and given new purpose by hand, creating a space with genuine narrative depth that no showroom purchase could replicate.
Sustainable Interior Design: Lessons from DOM Studio
DOM Studio carries lessons that extend well beyond Nowicka's own practice. For homeowners, interior designers, and architects thinking about how to reduce the environmental footprint of their projects, the studio offers several transferable principles worth considering.
- Source before you specify: Before purchasing new materials or furniture, explore what already exists — salvage yards, online reclamation platforms, demolition sites, and even the skip outside a local renovation project can yield remarkable finds.
- Embrace material imperfection: Waste and reclaimed materials often carry marks of age, use, and weathering that give a space character and depth. These imperfections are features, not flaws.
- Let the material lead: Working with found objects requires design thinking that responds to what's available rather than demanding the world conform to a predetermined vision. This constraint can be genuinely generative.
- Consider the full lifecycle: Sustainable design is not only about what materials are made of but how long they last, how they can be repaired, and what happens to them at the end of their use.
- Connect place to material: Where possible, source materials with a connection to the local context. This grounds a design in its setting and reduces transport emissions.
Marta Nowicka and the Broader Sustainable Design Movement
Nowicka's work sits within a growing movement of designers who are placing material ethics and circular thinking at the centre of their practice. Figures such as Max Lamb, Faye Toogood, and Studio Swine have each, in different ways, explored the creative potential of unconventional, found, or waste-derived materials. DOM Studio adds a domestic and deeply personal dimension to this conversation — demonstrating that these ideas are not only viable at the scale of gallery installations or experimental products, but can shape the spaces where people actually live and work.
As the design industry continues to grapple with its environmental responsibilities, projects like DOM Studio serve a function beyond the aesthetic. They make the possible visible, and they challenge the assumption that quality living requires new production. In a coastal studio built from what others discarded, Marta Nowicka has quietly made one of the more persuasive arguments for sustainable design that recent years have produced.
Conclusion: A Studio That Practises What It Preaches
DOM Studio at Camber Sands is, at its heart, a deeply human project. It is a designer building a home for herself, with her own hands and her own principles, in a landscape she loves. The fact that it is also a sophisticated argument for sustainable design, material reuse, and the creative potential of waste is what makes it significant beyond its picturesque setting. For anyone interested in where responsible design is heading — and what it might look and feel like to actually live inside it — Marta Nowicka's East Sussex studio offers a quietly radical answer.