Only when being pleased by yourself, can you obtain the peace of mind, with which you can get others pleased.

As the home for the couple of art teachers and their son, it’s expected to be the painting zone for them. Not only do we aim to make the space rich in artistic expressions, which present both the owners’ professional characteristics and their aesthetic awareness, and provide positive emotion value to them, but also we hope to enable the house to meet their demands of daily usage and the kid’s growing and changing needs.

We often think about what is the meaning of housing design, to create a more recognizable visual tension? Or to emphasize a pioneering living pattern? For us, the most essential part should be achieving the residents’ attitude of “PLEASE YOURSELF”.

In the private home, a place with strong personal attributes, we define the standard of “beauty” based on our own aesthetic preferences and build a traffic flow centered on our comfortable living conditions so at to get a self-pleasing plan, which is regarded as the spatial expression of “PLEASE YOURSELF”.

The owner hoped that the continuation and inheritance of the family could be expressed in tangible visual symbols. Hence, under this expectation, we designed a family crest evolved from the character “Lian” in his surname. In this case, the family crest was carved in the corner of the wooden tea table in the living room, coexisting with the wood and secretly continuing the family imprint.

Reshaping of Traffic Flow

The project was originally a staggered structure with an L-shaped traffic flow. The two longitudinal spaces on the north side were both load-bearing walls, which makes the plasticity and openness of the space greatly restricted and makes it difficult to design as well. So, the design was started by adjusting the position of stairs which is changed to a north-south orientation to corelate the usage scenarios of the living space. In this way, with the plane visual area expanded, the layout of the traffic flow was rationalized.

The giant cylinder at the entrance used to be a non-removable square structural column. After we opened the non-bearing wall on one side, it naturally formed a two-way traffic flow, which attached more changes to visual hierarchy.

We did not specifically emphasize the brightness of the space itself but hoped that the change of light and dark would occur when the light was drifting and bending with the structure of the space, so that people could talk freely in the light and introspect in the dark with their emotions flowing naturally in the field.

Harmonious Color Blending

We draw the genes of the color from the earth and root them in the lines and surfaces of space, thereby strengthening the perceptual relation between humans and nature. The home scene we expected should be as tolerant as the earth, accepting different emotions and behaviors and providing a continuous stream of support force.

The gentle curves are like paintings and ripples, providing dynamic and flexible sensory attribution to the flat and straightforward façade. The line-of-sight shuttles out from distinct scenes, getting softened and intertwined by those curves. At that moment, generated is the interactive relationship among residents, whose living scene is fused with vitality. 

As the connecting device in the space, the stairs play a crucial role in this case.

The stairs, based on a steel structure, establish a three-dimensional scene interaction through hollow forms. Under the stairs is placed a large glass water tank device, whose interior is filled with images of a post-war scene and ruins, as if flowers grew in the desert, reality existed in the void. All the images metaphorically reflect the hope of never giving up.

Deposition of Time

Naturally weathered old elm wood was chosen as the support material. As we used it, the wood gradually got stained with the cultural ambience of human, allowing us to witness time deposited in the space.

We try to use this method to make this space withstand the elapse of time, and continuously adapt itself to changes to produce new surprises during its long life.

The rise and fall of life as well as different periods represents different beauties: the birth of initial buds is hope, leafy trees and flowers blooming are grand views, the withering of old branches is reincarnation…

Just like the space itself, from the surprise of initial completion to the friction and integration during use, the process of gradually becoming milder and warmer is also a paintbrush that records the traces of life. The process of people living in it and constantly acquiring positive emotional value is also a constant process of “PLEASE YOURSELF”.