The requirements from the owners were quite simple – as a couple whose grown-up children were living abroad, what they needed beyond the basics was a spare room when the children visited and an expanded living area for them to relax and enjoy their time at home.
To increase the size of the living room, we shrank the kitchen and transformed it into an open-plan format – this suited the owners well as they did not cook often. The apartment originally had three bedrooms, but the owner only needed two. So we turned the third bedroom into an ensuite bathroom. But this meant we had to move the drainage location by extending the pipe across the length of the bedroom from its original location. We covered the pipe with a raised floor – although this reduced the height of the space, the walk-in closet we placed here leveraged these dimensions perfectly.
The bigger challenge in this apartment was the fact that the walls of the living room formed a sharp 135-degree angle with the front entrance and the rest of the apartment – how to arrange the living room furniture became a non-trivial matter.
To reduce the number of awkward angles, we decided to place the TV in a corner, aligning it to the sofa and the apartment’s main corridor. The triangular gap that resulted between the back of the TV and the corner wall was perfect for ventilation. We also put in vertical blinds behind the TV so the owner could close the blinds when it became too bright outside and the room would get reflected onto the TV screen.
With all the odd angles in the living room, we felt it was critical to shift the centre of focus away from the walls.
We decided not to push any furniture against the walls and instead floated them in the centre of the living space to encourage circulation flow around all sides of the living room. To divert focus away from the odd angles, we installed a number of mirror surfaces, such as on the cabinet doors and columns, and replaced the original set of small windows with a single-pane glass to bring in the view of Victoria Harbour. The pops of blue in the otherwise black and white decor further accented the space.
