Taipei-based architecture practice Marty Chou Architecture has carved out apartment's interior with a strip of deep-recessed windows to increase exposure daylight and create private sleeping quarters.

Named KOA Apartment, the apartment, located in Taipei, Taiwan, was conceived as a typical home but designed with a sculptural manner that can create alternative interior spaces. 

The house is a space that reflects the life of a unique urban family in its current stage. 

The 90-square-metre apartment is completely open, with hidden cabinets and a strip of deep-recessed windows surrounded on four sides. 

At the center, a 3.5-meter countertop is the anchor of the space, serving as a multi-functional table. The recessed windows receive constant northern-light by day, and transition into private sleeping quarters when closed at night. 

The sanitary space and its components are a play of geometrical volume and framed-view composition. The countertop and furniture, with their abstract appearance, resemble stone slab, woodblock, and clay. 

The architects treated them as sculptural pieces within the space. There is no definite spatial division within the space.

Designed for a young couple with a young child and a newborn, their wish was to have a home that is free of the norm, and is defined by their notion of how they wish to live. 

This is an excerpt of the brief they presented to the architects: "At this stage of our lives, spaces for sleeping, seating, eating, and sanitary activities can be stripped down to the bare essentials." 

"We wish to have more space for our children to run freely, as well as to have a large table that everyone can gather around to spend time together. If possible, we wish to live in a modern gallery of sorts; simple, calm, and filled with light, in which the spaces are left to the imagination as we fill them with life for the years to come."

Floor plan 

Marty Chou Architecture was founded in 2013 by Marty Chou. The firm produces projects based on the art of clarity and the beauty of simplicity in architecture.

Project facts

Project name: KOA Apartment

Design Firm: Marty Chou Architecture

Location: Taipei, Taiwan

Completion: 2020 

All images © Kyle Yu Photography

Drawing © Marty Chou Architecture

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