A luxurious living place should give oneself spatial enjoyment and extremely comfortable sensation. Spatial enjoyment should come from a unique arrangement of spatial changes rather than many rooms of different style or theme. I do not believe trend in interior and always avoid putting symbolic elements that represent any style. Every space should have it’s own in born character to develop and articulate. I think a comfortable, fresh and inspired living environment is far more important.
Interiorscape – Walls are removed as much as possible to emphasize the scale and spatial dimension along the major living area. The whole apartment is a unified space, as a landscape of layering. Areas along the windows and the main corridor are placed with small pebbles to form the “Green Layer”. It softens the hard envelope of the flat. Build in furniture, which is developed from a “box” concept forms the “Object Layer”. It represents the activity layers. There is a raised up timber deck at the center of the apartment that linked up the inner core and the outer core, which is more open. It turns up into a big living area. Two bedrooms and a kitchen, due to its enclosed character together represent the inner core. On top of these two layers, an “Information Layer” is added that forms the basic architecture of communication network and audio-visual system. Finally, the use of monotone by apply a palatte of different materials with co-ordinated colour in the apartment helps to blur and re-organize the boundaries.
Space Follows Activities - Inter-relationship between different zoning according to activities that brings delights of a space. In this apartment, I am trying to redefine boundaries according to activities. A place is formed according to different activities by different “objects”. Here, each build in furniture is treated as a “object” with a specific function that represents specific living activities. It is not the rooms, which define a place, but the furniture that interact with the user. It brings the place with character and made it alive. This character will go along with the user.
The use of sliding panels in the master bedrooms made flexible arrangement of space according to user’s needs, and can expand and contract for different situations. Similarly, the Tea-Room can be transformed into a guest room with the sliding partitions.
Hi-touch – The idea of “e-home” is being used very often recently. I think the meaning of “e-home” is how smart it is interacting with the user and emerged into one’s life. Many may think of putting lots of automation mechanisms and showing off the metallic Hi-tech equipment into a house. Some may believe linking up the whole house to the Internet. Yet, this is only the first step. How to use these technology and the touch of using it is also very important. An intelligent home should have a smart system working behind a sensitive and comfortable touch material. Therefore you may not see many buttons and machine in the flat but they are operating beyond your sight.
