Zhiqiang Zhang——32 square meter

Zhiqiang Zhang, invited for three consecutive years to be one of the jury members of the Good Design Award in Japan, one of the three most prestigious design awards in the world, was the first Hong Kong person to be invited to participate in the International Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy in 2000 and 2002. He has been selected as the only Hong Kong architect and interior designer to be featured in Taschen’s “. His subtle and rigorous control of spatial structure has been praised and emulated by design and non-design enthusiasts alike.

32 square meter home design becomes a model for ‘small homes into big spaces.’ Zhiqiang’s first claim to international architectural attention came when he designed the interior of a 32 square meter house in an ordinary street on Hong Kong Island. As a child, he lived with his parents and three sisters in this 32-square-meter house, with three rooms, one for his mother and father, one for his three sisters, and the last one rented out to others to supplement the household; he had to sleep on the sofa in the living room. Then his parents and sisters moved out, and he started tearing down walls, using mobile spacers and furniture that could be combined into three types of living space, including a home cinema with a massive screen for eight people to watch movies. Hong Kong people have been dealing with overcrowding all their lives.

Zhiqiang’s 32 square meter home, which resembles a standard hotel room, was transformed by him three times in 1988, 1998, and 2006 respectively, changing the small space into a variety of living possibilities. Zhiqiang’s 32 square meters’ self-contained’ design, which won the Asia Pacific Interior Design Individual Residence Award in 1999, is now almost a model of how a small home can be transformed into an ample space. This sample flat is a brilliant way of turning the impossible into the possible, an extraordinary piece of ingenuity squeezed out of Hong Kong’s congested living environment.

Features of Zhiqiang Zhang’s 32-square-meter self-house design：

Zhiqiang Zhang’s 32-square-meter old house renovated not only opened up all the indoor spaces but also gave it a rich urban character, which is an internalized urban experiment.

(1) Protection of privacy

The privacy of a house needs to be protected, especially the bedroom is the core of personal privacy. Zhiqiang Zhang’s 32-square-meter home design has designed the entrance as a kitchen and bathing space, pushing the bedroom to the innermost, protecting individual privacy to the greatest extent.

(2) Multifunctional

In Zhiqiang Zhang’s 32-square-meter home, the sofa can be changed into a bed; the curtains can become a movie screen, and the screen will be pushed up and down, and the window size will change accordingly; all furniture is movable and can be combined at any time to maximize the small space The variability. But the bathroom and sofa are placed together, and alternative people may only enjoy the feeling of “sitting in the bathroom.” The whole suite has only one space, integrating the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and study into multifunctional.

(3) Maximize space

Because of the limited space, “I hope to make this space bigger. I hope that less than 50% of my home is empty, and there is nothing, like a Swiss army knife, changing from time to time.” Zhiqiang Zhang broke the interior All compartments overlap and compress different functions, such as overlapping beds and sofas, overlapping curtains and projection screens, and compressing bedrooms, living rooms, projection rooms, toilets, and small corridors in the same space; relying on abundant lighting to create the interior As the environment changes, the lights in the home will be lit up in different colors for different guests; a bed, without any patterns or patterns, is equipped with pulleys at the foot of the bed, which can be moved to any space; all furniture , Sanitary ware, cloth art, etc. all adopt white tones.

In Zhiqiang Zhang’s 32-square-meter home, there is only one large space, and there is no wall in the bathroom, only a one-meter high partition; almost all the places against the wall are designed as storage space, making the storage space in the 32-square-meter residence the largest At the same time, the indoor public space has also been maximized, achieving the effect of “small area and large space.”

(4) Full of personality

Since Zhiqiang Zhang does not cook, the kitchen is tiny, and the refrigerator is large; because he hopes that there is a SPA in his home, and the bathroom is more extensive than most Hong Kong mansions. The place where the desk is placed in the study room; the place where the wardrobe is is the cloakroom; there are six sets of different lights, the lighting is very important, so that different lights can turn this space into different places; different friends come to give him different lights, There are different uses.

So, I have learned to refine the design of the house type. “although the sparrow is small, everything is complete” for tiny homes. This is the most critical aspect of architectural and interior design, where the designer’s skills are tested. The work of Hong Kong architects and Japanese architects is a realistic reference for the refined design of residential house types.