This project began where our first Nanjing story left off. Having spent since October 2024 working on the masterplan and elevations for a new townhouse development in the historic Mendong district, our client asked us to take on something more intimate: the interior of one of the finished townhouses.
The approach had, oddly, already been living in Paris. A pop-up show of our DHaus tables in Le Marais led to a chance commission, a penthouse near the Pompidou, for a client who bought a table and asked for a home to go with it. Presenting that scheme to our Chinese client over tea in London, they saw exactly what they wanted for Nanjing.
On the way back to China we stopped in Venice to study Carlo Scarpa, returning with three ideas: craftsmanship as a design language, where materials keep their own character; a dialogue between old and new; and a choreography of movement, using pace, framed views and light to shape experience.
We tested three concepts, a library, a gallery, and a sculpture evolved from the Paris apartment, and drew from all three in the final design. A triple-height atrium runs through the townhouse, curving more openly as it rises, with the timber warmth of the library and the curves of the gallery. Anchoring it is a sculptural stair, its first tread exaggerated in a nod to Scarpa’s own stepped forms.
The design is being costed, alongside a second commission for an apartment in the client’s Nanjing high-rise. Like Forest Gate before it, this has been less about a single set of drawings than where an idea can travel, from a table in Paris to a staircase in China.
