Dwellings | Ersha Island, Guangzhou: A Home in Nature

The chairs in a home don't have to match. Some keep to the living room, some gather round the table, some get carried to the window for the sun, some follow their owners into the bedroom. Each has its own temper; together, they look more like a family.

This is a duplex at Julong Mingzhu Garden on Ersha Island, Guangzhou: 240 square metres, by the river. It was designed by 301 Design, with design beginning in April 2022 and completion in April 2023. Several pieces in the home come from Dak Haan.

According to 301 Design, the owners are a couple born in the 1990s, back from living overseas, who wanted to bring quiet and nature indoors, in a home that is simple, artful and warm.

The design team set the tone with curved timber panelling and stone; a curved ceiling hides the beams, an awkward triangular corner of the original plan became a small planted scene, and light moves slowly through the room from behind the blinds. The walls are warm wood, the floor pale grey, and so the colours of the furniture become the most expressive thing in the house.

In the living room, off-white and brick-red sofas spread out low, and across from them stand two black Xiaoyuan Lounge Chairs.

Xiaoyuan is a 2020 design by Zhou Anbin, named for Xiaoyuan Xincun, the neighbourhood where its designer lived. The old furniture of its lanes, which kept people company over meals and tea, is gathered into contemporary proportions. The body of the chair closes round you from both sides, the back leans slightly away, and once you sit down, you simply loosen.

In a living room kept mostly pale, the two black chairs are like two full stops, holding the soft sofas in place. People read and talk here, and look up to the trees outside.

At the table are Weizhi Chairs. Weizhi turns on the phrase "to know the taste": sweet, sour, bitter, spicy and salty are the flavours on the tongue, and the many sides of daily life. Designed by Zhang Shiqi in 2022, it takes its frame from the classic forms of mid-century furniture: a sturdy solid-wood frame landing at an angle, the arm carried in one line down to the back leg, with a soft seat.

A marble dining table and a few dark Weizhi Chairs: the colour anchors the room while the lines stay light. Breakfast, dinner, friends at the weekend; the chairs are in the same place, waiting for someone to sit.

In the family room, a green Half-Hundred% Lounge Chair sits by the window, beside Dak Haan's Gudun Side Table.

The green chair by the window comes with a question about halves.

Half-Hundred% is a 2021 design by Zhou Anbin. In those years of energy shortages and recurring outbreaks, factories ran on rationed power, shipping stalled, and unfinished furniture piled up in the corners of the workshops. Walking those factory floors, we began to ask ourselves: could 50% of the usual state and craft deliver 100% of the experience of use, and of beauty?

Half-Hundred%'s answer was to take the skeleton that usually hides inside a sofa and rearrange it in the open: board, webbing, springs and foam. Crossed panels form the base, woven straps are laced into seat and back, and the traces of making are left in plain view. The lounge chair has a frame of imported marine plywood and measures 880 × 770 × 710 mm.

The half and the whole share a single chair: it looks unfinished, yet sits as a complete chair. We also hoped it would turn people's attention a little beyond their own lives, to the factories, and to the cargo left waiting in port in those years.

In this home, one is green and sits by the window in the sun; the other is black and has followed its owners into the bedroom.

The Gudun Side Table is small and round, like the body of a drum: just right for a cup of water or a book. Green chair and drum stool side by side at the window; you sit down, with trees outside and somewhere to put things within reach.

In a home of timber and pale grey, this touch of green stands out without raising its voice. As the designers put it, the family room was furnished with pieces that can be moved, so that life here can change later on: carry one chair from the window to somewhere else, and the home looks different.

Beneath a bedroom window stands a black Half-Hundred% Lounge Chair, and beside it a Mumu Stool used as a small side table, holding a plant and a book.

At the desk in the master bedroom there is another Mumu. Mumu comes from the idea that "two trees make a grove": a single length of timber split in two, then put back together, with its knots, growth rings, checks and the shadows of the tree all kept. It can be a stool, a side table, or just a place at the foot of the bed to put things down.

Xiaoyuan, Weizhi, Half-Hundred%, Gudun, Mumu: by two designers, between 2020 and 2022, and none of them made for this home. Placed here, each keeps to its own corner, yet they know one another.

We have always believed a home need not be filled with furniture. Leave a little distance between chair and person: room enough to admire it, and the wish to come closer. In a home a young couple furnished for themselves, furniture is at its best when you sit where you like, move it where you like, and the longer you live there, the more it looks like yours.