yinjispace

INTERIOR
Kangyaner Design
PHOTOGRAPHY
Li Ming
EDITOR
Gina
Collection

Yóu — to roam — is not a poetic name but a spatial philosophy: the Four Attainables of landscape painting set down by Northern Song master Guo Xi, enacted at their smallest scale within a two-person home in Tangshan.

The owners — a couple — began the commission with a memory: a tea gathering at the Huayi Hotel in Shanghai, dinner finished, the two of them settled across from one another with cups in hand. "The tabletop, the tea tray, the tea ware, the kettle — everything carried a sense of quality that was also completely at ease." They hoped their home might feel the same: relaxed, open, reassuring, warmly unhurried. Rather than answering with a style, we turned to a standard — the "Four Attainables" in Guo Xi's Lofty Aspirations in Forests and Streams: a landscape painting reaches its highest order when the eye can traverse it, gaze through it, wander within it, and come to rest.

A House is also a Garden — not only the title of Jin Qiuye's book, but the working premise for this project's spatial logic. Classical Chinese gardens operate through borrowed views, framed vistas, and shifting scenes at every step; each design decision here is a contemporary translation of garden-making into a single-level residence. Past the entry walnut wall set with six circular fluted-glass roundels, through the threshold and into the study, an arched opening in the desk's side panel faces, across the sightline, a cavity in the living room's natural black stone slab — a stone whose presence recalls Ruiyun Peak in Suzhou's Lingering Garden. The two apertures mirror each other like sections of a single mass: jiejing — borrowed scenery — transposed from garden to interior.

Kitchen island and study desk each form their own traversable circuit; shifting steps, changing scenes becomes not a quality of the corridor alone but the organizing logic of the entire floor plan. In the main space, a jiqing-blue column, walnut walls, and a circular window opening divide living from dining; a continuous bone-white floor draws them into a single horizontal scroll. Standing at either end, the eye travels through the whole composition with the calm of level distance — Guo Xi's the gazing-through, in a residential key.

Above the long table hangs a calligraphy by contemporary master Jin Yunchang — Chan Master Xuanlan's verse On Bamboo: fish leaping in the open sea, birds tracing the boundless sky. During the soft-furnishing phase, a blue ceramic fish arrived by chance and was placed on the tabletop, fitting precisely into the poem's image. The jiqing-blue column rises floor-to-ceiling from the kitchen — the only high-saturation color in the home — and answers, in echo, the fish within the calligraphy and the fish on the table. Three objects; one chain running through material and poetry alike.

In the living room, a natural black stone slab opens into a recess, and an Isamu Noguchi AKARI paper lamp glows from within; the dining area holds a ROOT&BRANCH ORBIT oak table with two Pasta armchairs by Toshiyuki Kita for Tendo Mokko. Each selection extends the same conviction: objects, too, carry spirit. Guo Xi's landscape theory → Tong Jun's garden-making → Jin Qiuye's residential garden → and we bring it into a two-person home — borrowing from three generations to do what we believe design can do: let a house become a landscape.

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