longwave studio Reorganizes a 112 m² Tainan Apartment Around the Daily Routines of a Family and Two Cats

We House is a 112 m² apartment interior in Tainan, Taiwan, designed by longwave studio for a family of three and their two cats. The lead team of Leo Wang and Wei Huang, working with designer Michaelia, did not start from a formal concept. They started from the things the household does every day: coming home, putting things away, working and spending time together. The design is an attempt to rearrange how those four activities relate to one another inside a fixed apartment shell.

That sounds modest, and in some ways it is. What makes the project worth a close look is how far a small set of moves goes. There is one dominant material, birch plywood. There is a short list of saturated accent colors: rust, ochre, peach, orange and a single blue tile. There is a freestanding plaster wall that does much of the spatial work. With these, longwave studio makes an ordinary flat feel deliberate without making it precious. The routines lead and the architecture follows them, which is the right order for a family home.

The Kitchen Wall as the Household's Engine

The kitchen is a long plywood wall that hides most of what a kitchen usually puts on show. Behind its doors are a pegboard pantry and the refrigerator, and a blue tiled shelf breaks the timber surface at counter height. Once the doors open, the wall turns from a calm backdrop into a working storage system. That is the clearest sign of the project's priorities. Storage is not something left to fill the gaps after the design is done. It is the design.

The blue tile is a small, well-placed decision. It marks the splash zone and the coffee station, the places where water and mess actually happen. It also gives the eye one cool note against an otherwise warm room. We would argue it does more for the kitchen's character than any amount of expensive joinery could.

Furniture That Behaves Like Punctuation

The round grey pedestal table with its rust-colored half-disc top sits at the center of the plan as a fixed point. The household turns around it on the way between kitchen, living area and entrance. Its shape is odd enough to read as an object and practical enough to sit at every day. The paper pendant overhead gives that spot a warm pool of light at night.

A small red toy car keeps turning up in these photographs: on the table, on a cantilevered shelf, on a peach block beside a green stone plinth. It is a photographer's motif, but it makes a fair point about the interior. The cabinetry is layered in ochre, white and plywood, and its ledges and offsets are sized for small objects and small hands. A child lives here, and the joinery accepts that rather than resisting it.

A Freestanding Wall That Organizes the Plan

The strongest spatial move is a freestanding white plaster wall. The living room uses it as a television wall, and it carries plywood cubbies along its top. Because it stops short of the surrounding surfaces, it reads as an object placed in the room rather than a partition dividing it. You can move around it, and from the entry you see past it.

It also takes on several jobs at once. It screens the arrival sequence, with open shoe shelves nearby. It gives the sofa something to face. It defines the edge of the dining zone without cutting it off. In a 112 m² apartment, getting that many functions out of one element is real efficiency, not just a look.

Daylight, Thresholds and Soft Edges

The living area is lit through white slatted blinds that filter the daylight into soft bands. A timber beam runs overhead, and an orange swivel chair and olive sofas fill the room. Elsewhere, an angled cream plaster panel next to a doorway softens what would otherwise be a hard corner. These are quiet details, but they shape how the flat feels as you move through it.

The bathroom door is the one dark gesture: a black-stained timber pivot door beside a slatted plywood wall. Marking a private threshold with the darkest material in the palette is a sensible use of contrast. In a home shared by three people and two cats, being able to tell clearly where a door is, and whether it is closed, matters more than it might seem.

Plywood Ceilings That Carry the Services

The ceilings are some of the most careful work in the project. Birch plywood soffits and boxes carry downlights, linear fixtures, a recessed pendant and slatted vent grilles. The services are not hidden behind a flat plaster ceiling. They are worked into a timber landscape overhead that follows the zones of the plan below.

This is an honest approach to a problem most apartments have, where ducts and wiring have to go somewhere. Using the same plywood as the cabinetry ties the ceiling to the walls. The ceiling becomes part of the furniture of the room rather than a lid on top of it.

Bedrooms Built from the Same Kit of Parts

The bedrooms use the same vocabulary at a calmer volume. A rust-colored floating nightstand sits under a white pendant. A birch headboard panel has two round cutouts that glow from behind. A full wall of pale wood wardrobe doors faces the window, and a concealed skylight-style light runs along the ceiling edge.

The circular cutouts in the headboard repeat the round table and the round light fixtures elsewhere in the flat. That kind of continuity keeps a small home from feeling like a set of separate rooms. Each bedroom feels like part of the same household.

Making Room for Work

Work is the fourth routine the brief names, and the project gives it real space rather than a corner of the dining table. One built-in desk sits by a window, between a dark wood-veneer wall and a slatted wardrobe. Another is an orange desk next to stacked yellow shelves under a lit ceiling. Both are fitted into the joinery instead of being added later as freestanding furniture.

The color coding is playful but it does a job. Orange and yellow mark these as active spaces, distinct from the paler bedrooms. In an apartment where home and office overlap, that signal helps keep the two apart.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan shows the logic behind the photographs. The foyer, study, dining and living areas, kitchen, bedrooms and bathrooms are arranged around a central open space, with the freestanding wall and the round table acting as anchors. A narrow corridor lined with birch plywood cabinetry and built-in ovens turns circulation into storage, so even the passages work.

Why This Project Matters

Most apartment renovations are designed from a mood board. We House is designed from a schedule. By asking where shoes go, where groceries land, where a laptop opens and where the family gathers, longwave studio arrives at a plan that is specific to one household. It could also be adapted for many others. Its success is in the relationships between spaces, not in any single showpiece.

It is also a useful lesson in restraint with materials. One sheet material used for walls, ceilings and storage, plus a few confident colors, creates more coherence than a wide palette would. For architects working on small urban flats in Taiwan and elsewhere, the takeaway is clear: put the effort into joinery and organization, and let the routines of daily life set the form.

We House by longwave studio (lead team: Leo Wang and Wei Huang; design team: Michaelia), Tainan, Taiwan. Area: 112 m². Completed: 2026. Photography by Dayform Studio.

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