Living Gallery Residential House

The inspiration came primarily from the client's needs and the flaws of the original floor plan. The client's greatest passion is photography — in his free time, he travels and shoots constantly. Over the years, he has built a significant collection: film posters, vinyl records, figures, books, decorative objects. Each piece carries a memory from a specific chapter of his life.

The existing layout had three clear shortcomings. The three-bedroom configuration made every room feel cramped and uncomfortable, and left the master bedroom without enough storage. The corridor connecting the public and private zones was dark and lightless — when storage was already insufficient, a space used purely for circulation was a poor use of floor area and felt visually closed off. And while the open kitchen helped relieve some of the visual pressure, the space still felt crowded when more than two guests arrived, which did not match the way the client imagined his life.

After working through the client's needs and the conditions of the existing space, the design team found that the gallery — as a spatial type — had exactly the qualities needed to address all of these problems at once: fluid, open, exhibition-oriented, and spatially flexible. That realization is what gave rise, quite naturally, to the concept of the Living Gallery.

There were three things I wanted to achieve. First, to make the 58-square-meter space feel significantly larger and brighter than its actual size — by replacing the corridor structure with a circular loop that connects all rooms and allows natural light to move freely through the entire floor plan. Second, to build a display system that the client can actively manage: not a fixed interior feature, but a living tool. Modular shelving and storage cabinets mounted on the walls, a picture hanging rail installed at the ceiling — these give the owner the agency of a curator in their own home. Third, to make luxury feel approachable rather than imposing. Marble can be warm rather than oppressive. That required carefully managing the color and visual temperature of every material in the space, and deliberately keeping the surrounding palette restrained, so that the client's precious collections could truly stand out.

Receiving this award is meaningful not only as recognition of the project itself, but as a signal that the core proposition — integrating gallery thinking into residential design — carries resonance beyond the specific context of this apartment. My plan is to develop this approach into a more defined methodology that can be applied across different scales and typologies of residential work.

The Living Gallery concept has real potential to expand. The circular circulation strategy, the modular display system, the lighting specification — these are not solutions invented for a single client. They are principles that can be tested and refined across many more projects. I am particularly interested in how these ideas translate into smaller urban apartments, where the tension between display and comfort becomes even more acute. I also hope this project opens conversations with clients who have never considered their home as a space for curation — people who live with things they love, but have never had the spatial framework to show them properly.

The decision was made entirely on paper, based on how the client actually intended to live, not on how he had been living before.Through our early conversations, two things became clear. First, the household would never have more than two people. This meant the third bedroom had no real purpose from the start. Second, the client wanted his future life to include hosting friends at home, being a generous and attentive host. This second point had not appeared in his original brief.It only came up when I noticed it as something he wanted but had not said out loud, and asked him directly whether he enjoyed inviting people over, since his previous home had never allowed for it.Once these two things were clear, the home would hold no more than two people, and the client genuinely wanted to gather friends there. Removing one unused bedroom to expand the public space stopped being a difficult choice. It became the obvious next step.I did not spend much time persuading the client of this. Most of the work was simply listening closely enough to help him organize his own vision for the life he wanted to live.

We did not approach this as a question of how to place art inside a home. We started from something more basic. In daily life, when do people want to look closely at something, and when do they simply want to relax? These are different states. Looking closely takes focus. Living takes ease. Without making that distinction clear from the start, a space can end up feeling like neither a real home nor a proper place for art.So in this project, we clarified one key principle early on. We did not divide the home into spaces that could display art and spaces that could not. Instead, we controlled the level of display, room by room. Art is not limited to the living and dining areas. It also appears in the study and the bedroom, where we used the same shelving system to hold pieces. But in those rooms, fewer pieces are shown, and they sit further apart, so they feel like part of daily life rather than the main focus of attention.In the public areas, by contrast, the pieces sit closer together, and people naturally stop and look there more often. This difference is not created through style. It comes from how many pieces are shown, where they are placed, and how the light falls. Each space develops its own way of being looked at, and a person can move between looking closely and simply living, without feeling pressure either way.For the lighting, we did not start with the fixtures themselves. We started with what a person would actually see. Recessed lighting forms the main layer across the apartment. We planned the position of each light so the brightness spreads evenly across the room, without spots that are too bright or too dark. On the walls where artwork is meant to hang, we added separate spotlights, so those pieces can be seen clearly when needed.On the shelving in the living room, we used linear lighting to make objects visible without turning them into something too sharp or too forceful. This allows different levels of display to exist at the same time, without competing with one another.All lighting was selected for high color accuracy. This is not only so the art holds its true colors. It also means every material in the space looks natural and consistent under the same light. Once the lighting is stable and well controlled, the space feels calmer to look at, and the relationship between the art and the space becomes clearer.At the same time, we deliberately left some areas without display. Not every wall needs a piece hanging on it. Not every corner needs to be a focal point. These quieter areas let a person step out of a state of constant looking and return to the simple feeling of daily life. They look unremarkable, but they matter to the overall balance.For us, this was never only a technical problem to solve. We had to decide, again and again, when art should be seen and when life should simply happen. Once that line is clear, art and living do not compete with each other. They exist together naturally.

A dead-end corridor has a clear shape. It has a beginning and an end, and once you reach the end, the path is finished. A loop does not work this way. It has no fixed starting point and no final destination. You can enter it from any direction, and you will eventually return to where you began, only to start again.This shape matters more than it first appears. A path with a beginning and an end suggests a single story, told once and then over. A loop suggests something closer to how memory actually works, not a straight line, but a pattern you return to again and again, each time picking up a slightly different feeling depending on where you are in your day, or in your life.We placed key pieces from the collection at points along this loop, not as fixed landmarks, but as moments the resident moves through repeatedly. A poster passed on the way to the kitchen in the morning is the same poster passed again on the way to bed at night, but it is never quite the same encounter. The light is different. The mood is different. The day behind it is different.Over time, this turns the collection into something closer to a personal timeline than a display. Each piece marks not just a place in the apartment, but a point the resident returns to, physically and emotionally, as part of an ordinary day. The loop does not ask him to stop and admire anything. It simply places these markers along a path he already walks, so the connection between the collection and his own life builds quietly, through repetition, rather than through any single dramatic moment of viewing.This is close to what we mean when we say a home is a living gallery. Not a space where milestones are framed and hung once, but a space where the act of living, walking the same loop day after day, continues to give those milestones new meaning over time.