Social Fun: A Unique Residential House Design

Creating Spaces for Social Interaction and Personal Belonging

To follow the flow of the staircase makes life circle around dining. With the concept of making a home closer to a commercial space, the inspiration for the first floor is the American bar to construct a lively field for social interaction. The second floor connects the diverse characteristics of modern eating habits, making the kitchen the core and forming a social interaction situation exclusively for a small family.

In this space, there are structural problems of fragmental corners and fractional windows all over the construction. The design team arranged the frame views between the pillars to form the end scenes of an exhibition one by one and added shelves to fill the blanks from fragments. They also ensured the light path of each window so that the light from the front and from the back could meet to achieve the best flow and lighting. The staircase connects the first-floor bar and the second-floor home kitchen. The kitchen on the second floor replaces the living room and is divided into the functions of a dining table, frying kitchen, and bar without over-focusing on the limited area of each division to create scenes of interaction.

The first floor features the American bar. The L-shape bar and sofa are arranged to guarantee more flexible accommodation. The design team also made room for ample aisles and created frame views with the fireplace, neon lights, and display wine cabinet to connect the fun façade expression. Wooden shutters were applied to integrate the windows, keeping the lighting flow of the long-shaped space and ensuring privacy when necessary. The second floor, the social interaction area for the family, introduces linear iron parts to contribute to the flow of light without any obstacles. Starting from the dining room, the layout develops into two flows of the kitchen and the living room. The sink, refrigerator, and dishwashing machine are placed out, blurring the existing boundary between cooking and dining. Under the framework of Northern European style, the private field is accompanied by some mobile furniture so that users can lean on the small table by the window and taste afternoon tea, enjoying leisure time.

Through the connection of the staircase, life starts from social interaction and diet. By filling up the fragments between the structural pillars in the construction with end scenes, shelves, or cabinets, the design team created abundant display frame views. At the same time, by following the usage of each plane, they carefully divided each function without over-limiting the boundary between each other. The social interaction scenes with interactive and flowing feelings are created on the long and narrow plane. The vertical line is used to connect people and the space and spread out all kinds of possible perspectives in life.

This unique residential house design, named Social Fun, was completed in Taipei, Taiwan, between January 2018 and August 2018. It successfully overcame challenges such as maintaining a smooth flow and space feeling without any obstacles for social interaction in the long and narrow layout. The design team kept the existence of every window while beautifying the façade appearance through materials and design techniques.

Social Fun was awarded the Bronze A' Design Award in the Interior Space, Retail, and Exhibition Design category in 2019. This prestigious award recognizes outstanding and creatively ingenious designs that authenticate experience and resourcefulness. Esteemed for incorporating best practices in art, science, design, and technology, the design exhibits strong technical and creative skills and contributes to quality of life improvements, making the world a better place.