Architect Yann Chu Redesigns a Contemporary Taiwan Home

Read article : Architect Yann Chu Redesigns a Contemporary Taiwan Home

This article originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Architectural Digest.

It began as a minor experiment," Rudy Tseng maintains, characterizing his move some four years ago from a penthouse apartment in downtown Taipei to a rental house in the suburbs. "I wanted to see if I preferred living outside the city limits—a good 40 minutes from Taipei 101," which he takes care to explain is the world's tallest skyscraper and has even been dubbed "one of the Seven New Wonders of the World." Just as soon as he was able to conclude that he did indeed like the suburbs better, he purchased a place there, in a gated community of 600 contemporary look-more-or-less-alike houses (the strict community code dictated white exterior walls and red-clay-tile roofs).

On the upside: The three-level hillside house afforded a wide-reaching view of archaic pastoral—a valley, a river and, in the distance, a mountain with a face of grand ferocity, bearing as it did a decided resemblance to a lion's head. On the downside: Though only around 20 years old, the structure was deteriorating, battered by the roaring wind and flogging rain of Taiwan's long typhoon season, and there were weeds in the disheveled garden "as high as a human."

Tseng, a former managing director of The Walt Disney Company in Taiwan and now a professor of creative management in the graduate school of a university there, tapped the Taipei-based architect and designer Yann Chu, who had worked on both his apartment and a rental house. "When I first met Yann, he was just back from apprenticing in Paris," Tseng recalls, "and he had named his Taipei studio Marais Design, after the district in the French capital that he had worked in and loved. He was young and fresh, with a lot of good ideas, especially industrial-design concepts. I'm going to go a bit out on a limb here and call him, more than a designer, a creative space reformer. Because even after a year of living in his brainchild, I am still discovering new design elements and experiencing strong aesthetic emotions."

Tseng's own tastes ran to the simple, if not the minimal. It was inescapable, given his collection of contemporary Asian art (including works by Xu Bing, Michael Lin, Li Yuan-Chia, Lin Liang-Tsai, Jien-Shiu Lien, Chieh-Jen Chen and Zhen Zhon) and YBAs (Young British Artists, including Jason Martin, Ian Davenport and David Batchelor), that he would want the space to look a little like a contemporary art gallery. "I told Yann that everything that could be white should be white," he explains. "I needed it to all be fairly open but without feeling too cold." In the end, thanks to the architect-cum-designer's dynamism, Tseng got "something not just modern but, even better, futuristic."

Chu "changed everything," Tseng says—except for the color of the exterior and the roof, "the two no-nos." Calling for the greatest ingenuity were the concept and subsequent execution of the staircases, which are different for each level. Some are freestanding, others intramural; some are solid, others "see-through" (the railing on the staircase connecting the first and second levels, for instance, is a silver stainless-steel tube encased in glass, while the railing on the staircase connecting the second and third levels is red lacquer). The back side of the open first-to-second-level staircase is accentuated with translucent light boxes.

The architect used reflective or semitransparent materials for the flooring throughout in order to create "other dimensions." To fuse the house to the landscape, he enlarged the existing floor-to-ceiling multipaneled glass doors that opened from the living room to the garden, made still other windows bigger and even added fenestration. "On the third floor, in the den, in front of where I indicated I would be wanting to sit and read," Tseng recounts, "Yann made a window expressly to frame a banana tree he'd planted in the garden right outside." Nor did the architect forget to typhoon-proof the entire house, rigorously reinforcing everything in sight.

The garden plan for all three levels of the building as it climbs the hillside was Chu's, too. On the ground floor, 30 immature Taiwanese cypress trees frame Korean grass, a couple of Japanese cherry trees and a rectangular pond that serves as a swimming pool for Tseng's four-year-old golden retriever, Hamish. The first floor, reached by outdoor stairs, encompasses the entrance hall (Tseng describes it as "a meet-and-greet area for guests") and the vast, luminous living room. The second floor consists of a dining area, a family room and a kitchen—one big open-plan space. A glass wall with a honeycomb inlay, which allows sunlight to penetrate while maintaining privacy, divides the dining area from the lushly planted side garden.

As one ascends the stairs to the master bedroom and bath, den and guest room that constitute the third floor—a double-height amalgam where the architecture achieves its fullest, most engulfing expression—David Batchelor's freestanding neon light boxes blaze into view. Yellow, orange, blue, purple and green, they proceed to bounce fantastically off the glass panels that slice through the space as well as off a structural column that Chu wrapped in stainless steel for a mirroring effect.

Beyond a monumental door yawns the cavernous master bedroom with its semitransparent walls and pyramid ceiling. The master bath is semiopen, with a concave semitransparent boundary-blurring ceiling. On its other, semitransparent side is the book-lined den, which has furniture by Eames and Saarinen. (Chu himself designed a lot of the furniture for the house, including long benches carved from indigenous cypress, sculptural-looking wood stools and assorted cabinets, plus a dining table, a low table and a sideboard.)

"You've probably heard this before, but Chinese care about feng shui," Tseng declares, pointing out a white, surfboardlike object above his bed that he explains is hiding an air-conditioning unit. "One of the things you have to be most cautious about is bed location. The trouble was there was a structural beam over where we wanted to put my bed, and you must never put your bed directly under a beam, unless you want to have bad dreams and bad luck as well. So we put the air conditioner up there and covered it with the surfboard design. You know, there are some people who even obsess about the direction of their bed, but I figured enough was enough—I didn't want to go overboard," he says with a laugh. "Although this whole house is maybe a little bit overboard."

For all that it may look on the outside like its 599 neighbors, it certainly is singular and unexpected within: Together, Yann Chu and Rudy Tseng have made it boldly go where no house in the community has gone before.