Monoform

About The Entry

Monoform is a 90 m² apartment in Beitun, Taichung, designed for a couple who are also art collectors. The project treats daily life as an ongoing act of curation, a home suspended between living and exhibiting. Rather than producing formal tension, the design relies on order, emptiness and restraint, allowing art and everyday life to coexist within a single framework.

The couple asked for a generous shared living area. Instead of dividing the plan with walls, furniture defines the boundaries, gathering the room toward its centre and creating an open, inward-facing space that feels larger than its footprint.

Broad planes of grey-white wall and cabinetry form a neutral backdrop. Like gallery walls, they step back so that furniture, artworks and light can be read clearly. A low-reflective, finely textured paint holds subtle shadows as daylight shifts, giving the walls depth and a sense of time rather than the flatness common in minimalist interiors. Against this matte ground, a mirror-finished stainless steel cabinet reflects and fragments the room, sharpening the contrast between solid and void.

The greatest challenge lay overhead. The ceiling height was only 2.7 m, dropping to 2.3 m beneath the beams, yet the clients wanted concealed air-conditioning and an energy-recovery ventilation system. Boxing in the beams would have compressed the entire room. Instead, the beams remain exposed, and a curved ceiling profile was designed as the services themselves: its continuous reveal houses the supply and return vents for both systems. Form and function merge into one gesture, and the ceiling reads as a single uninterrupted line.

The result preserves the full height between beams while delivering fresh air and climate control invisibly. Since moving in, the couple spend noticeably more time together in the living room, the very space they asked for, now the centre of their home.

Monoform shows that restraint is not absence. By quieting everything else, a home becomes a place where life itself is on display.

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