NO Regrets

This house, belonging to Shanghai Li-Long residential building, is located in the center of Shanghai, with the effective (usable) floor area of 80㎡. It was used as the rental housing in the past. Last year, they found me and said that they had retrieved this house and wanted to live here for their own use without leaving it unused. And they wanted to renovate it into a simple house.
(In the past) The depth is less than 4m and the width is 15m, showing a long and narrow structure. And the story height is not high enough. The division of the functional area is maladjusted. The storage space, which is not large enough, is distributed unevenly. And the kitchen area shows a shape of “H”. It’s a typical house with two bedrooms.
Firstly, we widen and heighten the entrance door to offer a majestic feeling visually. Secondly, the walls of the dining room and the living room are lengthened and shortened respectively so as to avoid the structure that the entrance door is facing the bathroom directly.We design to install a row of floor-to-ceiling cabinets in the dining room to store necessary supplies, which will not influence the space of the surrounding corridors at the same time. We demolish the wall that connected the dining room and the kitchen (in the past) and replace it with the gray glass so that the sunlight can get into the dining room completely. As for the kitchen area, We design a set of “chocolate” display cabinets in the corridor to divide the private and public areas, which will achieve the effect of one room and two functions and strengthen the privacy and acoustical insulation. The bathroom is full-featured, even if its space is very small. We install a shower cubicle in the north-south direction to replace the bathtub and adopt the hidden toilet and the wall-mounted washing machine to leave more space for the corridor. The house owner said that they needed a large amount of space to store articles, so we install a half-closed cloakroom and a row of bookcases in the study. It will be a kind of communication with the life by reading books and listening to music here. The cloakroom in the master bedroom is also tailored for the client. Personally, I don’t like the half-height cabinets, because they will get dirty easily and the space is not large enough for use. The cloakroom is one of the most important storage areas in the house, so we should maximize its practicability as far as possible. In order to maximize the effective area of the living room, we remove the glass door that divided the living room and the balcony in the past to integrate the two parts (the living room and the balcony) into one.We install a large area of floor-to-ceiling window in the balcony so that the client can stare blankly here in good weather. They may talk to themselves that it’s warm today and the sun is shining while crossing the legs.