Inside A High Ceiling Modern Japanese-Inspired Home

“The feeling of looking out of the window is very soothing; it’s as if you were standing on a mountain. When I get up in the morning, I would go straight to my garden of greens and start my day with a cup of coffee,” shared the owner of this serene Japanese style home designed by Nu Infinity.

In my 15 years working in the design scene, one of the peculiar and most common characters I’ve encountered numerous times is the client who purchases corner houses, Semi-Ds, or bungalows for the extra garden space, but yet none of them use them.

Today’s episode on Design Seed, we will be sharing our experience of homeowners who have beautiful, lush landscapes surrounding their property, and yet they decide to close all their curtains and blinds just for one reason they call ‘privacy.’

We are here today at Eco Ardence, a gated and guarded community—a quiet enclave flourished with lush landscapes and beautiful parks and trails. So, we went on a mission to educate our clients to design their house in favour of the surrounding landscape and not hiding themselves from it.

We always go about asking our clients: How do you live your life at home? How do you use that space? Where do you spend most of your time at home? This series of questions would all conclude to how we choreograph the space planning for this project.

“I want our home to be comfortable and to keep things minimal. And of course, there must be design elements in it. Overall, what we emphasize is to not have an excessive luxury,” shared the homeowner.

When we first visited the site, we felt the house was too shallow, so we decided to extend the house to the rear and demolish what was initially the kitchen in the center of the house. Now, with the extra space in the center and a glorious double-volume ceiling, we decided to choreograph a new purpose for this property.

It allows for more natural lighting to light up the foyer and gives your guest a tease of what’s behind those semi-transparent screens. A functional storage cabinet is a must; as convenient as it may seem to throw your keys and belongings upon coming home, it is also a neat and functional solution to stowing your shoes and daily gears neatly tucked away.

The living area of the house was specifically designed to feel very intimate and cozy. The initial TV wall was off-proportion due to a single window opening on the left. We decided to lengthen the TV feature cabinet, overlapping the window opening as part of a feature to the natural Calacatta marble TV wall.

We would like to give Express Marble a shoutout for supplying and installing one of the most unique features of this project, which is the natural Balmes dark grey limestone flooring. We chose the honed surface finishing to give a matte character to the flooring, which gives a complementing contrast against the solid wood platform. These Balmes dark grey limestones are natural, durable, and easy to maintain; you may find it looking rather familiar to one of the reputable hotels in Kuala Lumpur called the Alila Bangsar.

Where most people would focus spending more time at the living hall in front of the television, we knew we wanted the heart of the home to be centric of the high double volume and large sliding doors that open up to a spacious, beautiful garden. At Nu Infinity, we believe in a motto called ‘Altering the Ego of Practicality.’ So, when we were brainstorming about the centric purpose of this space, we asked ourselves: What else could we do other than placing a dining table in the center of the double volume?

And this was the outcome of our gratifying brainstorm: a solid timber platform in Brazilian Oak matched with a solid chunk of dining table. The heart of the home is now staged as a focal masterpiece from all angles of the property.

The homeowner shared, “Other than being a dining area, my daughters can also play around, and my wife can also do yoga. As you can see, we don’t have many chairs here, but we can entertain a lot of guests. Children, relatives, and friends often come to our house. Everyone gathers at the tatami area and then we can talk together. Some like to lay down on the tatami, so I think that’s a really good hangout spot. Whether it’s eating, chit-chatting, or chilling, this area really suits our taste.”

The kitchen wall that was initially demolished was turned into an open-concept kitchen/bar area. A warm and welcoming foreground of the natural veneer highlight creates a continuity in the color palette of timber, blending coherently with all the white carpentry and natural grey limestone flooring.

“After I moved in, I spent a lot of time gardening. What takes the most of my time is watering the plants, so I tried to figure out how to lighten up the workload.”

Adapting the ideology to this site with the focus on the outdoor spaces was one of the main intentions from our team. We are always considering orientation and vantage points to the outside, which could be very beneficial when it comes to designing the interiors. The idea of connecting to the view outside gives an approach of an extension of the size of the home.

At the master bedroom, for an instance, we knew the moment we first entered the room that the view of the landscape was a valuable insertion to our design board. The bedroom was designed to be subtle and calming, allowing the beautifully framed window—which is almost a picture frame looking to the backdrop of the borrowed landscape—to be the focal perspective. We designed a daybed which became not just an outlook, but also a place to sit and enjoy the breathtaking view of nature.

The initial floor plan design had a narrow corridor, which was what was supposed to be a wardrobe area. To enlarge the quality of the space and allow for more natural lighting, we decided to demolish the dividing wall and extend the entire bathroom. We used a simple colour palette with white vertical tiles and wood trims as the distinctive outline.

“I work from home most of the time, spending most of the days in my workspace. I’ll try to ride on my bicycle at home if I’m free, or go for a run outside the community area.”

Repeating the ideology of connecting to the view outside, we had this concept for the study room downstairs of creating a threshold which was almost like a private garden. The study was designed to have an extension to the greeneries of the well-kept garden, which was one of the owner’s many passionate hobbies.

A big part of the design brief was to have this home office work studio setup. The client practices working from home, and it needed to be a productive and versatile functional workspace. Achieving an ergonomic setup with an adjustable height work desk makes working or even standing for presentations versatile for the client.

No workstation is complete without the ultimate Prism+ ultrawide curved monitor, with a cool 34″ curved screen and next-level brilliant colours. The monitor produces enhanced vibrant colours with a 165Hz refresh rate. The Prism+ X340 Pro is perfect for gaming and video editing.

With technology advancement rapidly evolving day by day, people are beginning to learn to accept, adapt, and some may even begin to rely on smart home systems to enhance the quality of lifestyle and convenience. For our clients, we incorporated basic smart home functions to improve the enjoyment of their daily lifestyles.

“I think the biggest convenience of having a smart home is I can remotely control all the lights and switches when I am not home, as well as controlling the curtains.”

The key undertones to every aspect of the project is the simple color palette that creates a warmth and welcoming vibe. This combination reflects a modern contemporary Japanese aesthetic, and I would personally say it’s rather timeless.

“I think there is a big difference between a home with design and one without. If you did not go through the design phase for your new home, you may find something lacking in your home, or things that you bought or installed wrongly, or things that are not what you need. People nowadays weigh on the quality of life. I think it’s great to slow down. Of course, we’ll still need to work, but we get to also bond with our children. This is very important to us. We have nice parks and various facilities here, and we can interact and have activities with our children here,” shared the homeowner.

I am most proud of the reason or that specific space solution of the dining area, which is unashamedly a very modern contemporary design that is also a major key element that amplified and enhanced the quality of lifestyle for the client’s way of living. And that is pretty much the vision and ethos of our practice: spatial choreography and design that improves our daily way of living.