OUJ Rewires a 72-Square-Meter Taipei Apartment for Multigenerational Living After the Pandemic

The pandemic changed a lot of things, but one of the quieter shifts was how families recalculated proximity. For the Hu family, split between southern and northern Taiwan, the virus made the question of aging care impossible to defer. The answer was a 72-square-meter apartment inside a 40-year-old public housing complex in Taipei, facing the greenery of the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab on one side and the commercial noise of a major boulevard on the other. Not a glamorous starting point: low ceilings, three small bedrooms, iron window grilles, and fixed AC units that strangled what little light and air tried to enter.

Taipei-based OUJ took the project on as a spatial negotiation between togetherness and autonomy. Rather than simply knocking down walls for the now-standard open plan, the studio inserted a series of freestanding plywood volumes and translucent partitions that can be reconfigured as the family's needs evolve. The result is an apartment that feels twice its size, not because of any illusion, but because nearly every surface serves double duty and every threshold offers a choice: open or closed, shared or private.

Plywood Volumes as Spatial Infrastructure

The primary architectural move is a set of pale plywood volumes that stand free of the existing walls and ceiling, reading as furniture at the scale of architecture. They house storage, define circulation, and create implied rooms without ever fully enclosing them. Walking through the apartment, you're always aware of what lies beyond: a sliver of bathroom tile, the edge of a curtain, light filtering through a gap at the top of a partition. The effect is closer to a small gallery than a residential corridor.

Crucially, these volumes do the structural work of replacing the original three-bedroom layout without replicating its claustrophobia. The low ceilings remain, but because the plywood stops short and the eye can travel over and around the inserts, the compression becomes rhythmic rather than oppressive.

Translucent Screens and the Art of the Soft Boundary

Where the plywood volumes are solid and warm, the translucent glass and pleated panels that OUJ threads between them are ethereal. These screens slide, fold, and layer to produce degrees of privacy rather than binary open/closed states. A grandmother reading in the bedroom can close the pleated curtain for quiet while still registering the movement of family members as soft silhouettes. It's a spatial courtesy that acknowledges multigenerational life isn't about constant togetherness but about calibrated distance.

The pink trim on the glass panels is a small but telling detail. It prevents the apartment from slipping into the earnest minimalism that dominates so many Taiwanese renovation projects, injecting personality without demanding attention.

Color as Wayfinding

OUJ uses color sparingly but with real intent. Yellow mosaic tiles mark the wet zones: kitchen and bathroom floors glow with a saffron warmth that distinguishes them from the pale, almost chalky surfaces of the living and sleeping areas. Red accents flash at thresholds. A mint green range hood anchors the galley kitchen. Each hue operates as a navigational signal in a space where conventional room labels no longer apply.

The terrazzo vanity in the bathroom deserves particular mention. Its speckled surface sits between the yellow tile below and the plywood walls flanking it, pulling both material palettes into a single moment. It's the kind of detail that rewards proximity, something you notice while brushing your teeth, not in a photograph.

Reclaiming the Window

Removing the iron grilles and fixed air conditioning units was a prerequisite, not a design flourish, but OUJ makes the most of it. The south-facing windows now frame the mature trees of the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, and the studio has placed low benches and desks directly against the sills to encourage occupation of these newly breathable edges. In a 72-square-meter apartment, every centimeter of daylit perimeter counts.

The horizontal window in the dining area is particularly effective: it crops the foliage outside into a landscape painting that shifts with the season, providing a visual extension that the floor plan alone cannot deliver.

Living and Dining as the Heart of the Plan

The dining table is the gravitational center. OUJ places it in the most generous zone of the apartment, flanked by the kitchen counter on one side and a brown curtain on the other that can conceal or reveal the adjacent living area. The chairs, each a different color, red, blue, green, are a deliberate refusal of matching sets. They signal that this is a space where different people with different rhythms converge, and that convergence is the point.

A stepped plywood counter bridges the kitchen and dining zones, providing both a serving surface and a subtle spatial gradient. You move from the utilitarian tile floor of the kitchen across the threshold to the smooth white floor of the dining area, and the counter choreographs that transition.

The Private Rooms

The bedrooms are compact and intentionally so. OUJ treats them as places for rest and retreat, not as self-contained suites. Pleated curtain dividers replace solid doors in at least one configuration, reinforcing the idea that privacy here is a gradient. The potted ferns and low wooden planter in the transition zone between bedroom and corridor soften what could be a clinical adjacency.

There's a generosity in this restraint. By shrinking the bedrooms from the original layout's three cramped cells, the studio liberates communal space where the family actually lives together, cooking, eating, talking. The bedrooms become satellites, not fortresses.

Material Details Up Close

OUJ's material palette is restrained to three or four key players: birch-toned plywood, Mortex surfaces, yellow mosaic tile, and translucent glass. The plywood does the heavy lifting, appearing as cabinetry, partition, bench, and frame. Mortex, a microcement-like finish, provides a tactile softness to countertops and selected walls. The combination avoids the sterility of all-white renovation while keeping the palette unified enough that 72 square meters never feels busy.

The vertical slatted screen between kitchen and dining offers a moment of visual permeability that echoes the translucent partitions elsewhere. It's a consistent design grammar: you can always see through, over, or around. Enclosure is the exception, not the rule.

Plans and Drawings

The axonometric diagrams reveal the phased thinking behind the layout. OUJ designed three configurations that the apartment can move between as the family's needs change: one optimized for independent daily life, another for closer care arrangements, and a third that maximizes communal space when the daughters visit. Colored volumetric blocks in the diagrams correspond to the plywood inserts, making the system legible at a glance. The floor plans confirm just how aggressively the original three-bedroom layout was dismantled, and how much spatial gain resulted from treating furniture-scale volumes as the primary organizing device.

Why This Project Matters

Multigenerational living is one of the oldest domestic arrangements on earth, and yet contemporary architecture routinely treats it as an edge case. L'appartement Hu is a correction. It demonstrates that a 72-square-meter apartment in a 40-year-old housing block can accommodate shifting family structures without requiring anyone to sacrifice dignity or daylight. The trick is not a bigger footprint but a smarter system of soft boundaries, where plywood volumes and translucent screens do the work that corridors and closed doors used to do.

OUJ's phased approach is the most forward-thinking aspect of the project. Designing for a single moment in a family's life is easy. Designing for three or four moments, aging parents who are independent today but may need closer care tomorrow, daughters who visit on weekends now but might move in later, is genuinely difficult. This apartment answers that difficulty not with technology or expense, but with spatial intelligence. That's a lesson worth carrying far beyond Taipei.

L'appartement Hu by OUJ, Taipei, Taiwan. 72 sqm. Completed 2025. Photography by Studio Millspace.

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