The project is on the 24th floor of a recent built apartment building next to a golf course in New North Zone, Chongqing, which provides a good viewpoint of surrounding landscape. Owner is a young married couple, specially, the wife is a yoga teacher with a wish that one day she can run her own yoga studio. For this reason, we try to create a possible yoga classroom in their new home, hoping her dream realized earlier by this project.

The apartment is divided to be a public room and a private room. In the private room, we use glass partitions to separate bathroom and powder room, and a low-wall to separate powder room and the bed, in order to make the uncapacious space bigger and brighter. In the public room, we try to avoid the conventional spaces such as “living room” and “dining room,” instead, redefine different functional places distributed in different area of the room, so that the habitants can enjoy their activities in the same room without any spatial limitation.

For this 80sqm apartment, theoretically there is no enough space to set up another independent yoga classroom. Therefore, we prefer a flexible method that the public room could transform freely between two different modes – home mode and yoga studio mode. We use a step to separate the public room into “up” and “down” parts. When it switches to the “home mode”, the “up part”, as a relatively independent living space containing the small size and portable furniture, serve as the relaxation area to the private room, while the “down part” works for meeting and entertainment needs. When it switches to the “yoga mode”, the portable furniture could be removed from the “up part” and be combined with the sofa in the “down part”. After that, by reversing the wardrobe doors, it can turn the “up part” into a perfect place for yoga exercise with the whole wall of mirrors. Meanwhile, the down part is converted to be a suitable waiting lounge serving the yoga class.

To improve the comfort and naturalness for this high building unit, we sacrifice a small area of the existing balcony for gardening, and relocated the sliding window which separate the room and the balcony to increase the interior area. Leading the view directly to the interior without balcony optimally reduces the distance between the landscape and interior space, and minimizes the boundary between the exterior and interior.