Gatherings | Guangzhou Design Week: Take a Seat in Half Room

In The Importance of Living, Lin Yutang wrote that the life of leisure is not the exclusive right of the rich and successful, but the product of an intelligent way of living.

This kind of leisure is not idleness but a state of ease and fullness. At Guangzhou Design Week 2025, Dak Haan founder Zhou Anbin and BDSD Boundless Design founder Lin Wenke curated an exhibition together, and built such a vessel amid the noise of the halls. They called it Half Room.

In Chinese, jian means both a room and a span of time. Half Room answers a contemporary ideal of living: half left to space, to hold things; half left to time, to let things happen.

The stand is a white timber house of 209 square metres. It distils the arcades of Lingnan qilou buildings and the idea of being half inside and half out, half public and half private, then expresses them in a minimal Western modern language as a light, open box.

The whole stand is lightly veiled in translucent fabric, so the outlines of objects and light show through the haze, like the screens and lattice windows of older buildings. People outside see a little but not all of it, and want to walk round and in.

Inside the door are a banana plant and a television. The TV stands on the Ruying Mobile TV Stand, which rolls from place to place instead of being fixed to a wall.

Against the wall is a green Pianpian Drawer Chest, with an all-travertine Linlin Round Dining Table in front and a black Zhizhu Chair, whose lines are drawn from the back of a bamboo chair.

Further in is the sofa area. In front of the cream Shanjian Sofa sits a stone-topped Linlin Round Coffee Table. The blue Meigui Lounge Chair comes from the square, low-backed form of the traditional "rose chair", and sits by a window or a table without blocking the view. Behind them stands a black Xiguan Shelf.

On the lounge wall is the motto, "gain from being busy, reward from being idle". Beside the caramel Yueban Sofa are a black Xiaoyuan Lounge Chair, a black-framed glass Yanxia Coffee Table, and a red Mumu Stool.

A green Moran Screen divides the lounge. On this side is the Yueban Sofa; on the other, a black Youmi Sofa, designed by Zhang Shiqi, with the blue Yifang Coffee Table in front and, further back, the dark Half-Hundred% Screen.

The green Half-Hundred% Lounge Chair stands between the plants and the screen. It takes the skeleton that usually hides inside a sofa into the open, with straps woven into seat and back.

At the back is a green-stone Yanxia Table, with the Half-Hundred% Screen to one side. A blue Linglong Shelf stands against the wall, and green Half-Hundred% Lounge Chairs and cane Xuanwu Chairs sit around the table.

"Half" means incomplete, not absolute, leaving something for the viewer to finish. One corner of the stand opens deliberately outwards, and there Dak Haan's new ultralight carbon-fibre Fanhua Chair hangs like an installation.