Li Residence is a partial renovation of a turnkey apartment in Fuzhou, China, by local studio Fun Associates, led by designer Yu-chen Jiang. The kitchen and bathroom were left exactly as the developer delivered them, a cost decision that pushed the entire intervention onto the floor, the ceiling, and the public zone running from the entry to the living room.

The kitchen still needed handling, because its original glass sliding door clashed with the new palette. Jiang replaced it with an external mirrored double door. Closed, the mirror removes the kitchen from view of the living room and returns the light oak stone-plastic flooring and warm-white walls back along the entry passage, which makes a narrow corridor read as deeper. On the right side of the entry, a floor-to-ceiling plane of dark walnut veneer conceals a full storage room.

The sofa and dining table swapped positions front to back, which freed a stretch of wall for a built-in home bar. Smoky-pink marble runs continuously from the bar countertop up the backsplash and is the only chromatic accent in the apartment. The living room has no fixed TV wall. A frame-style television sits on a movable stand, and a set of black bouclé modular sofas is pulled forward, away from the wall.

One bedroom was opened toward the living room as a half-open study and tea room that doubles as a guest room when needed. A window-like opening cut into the wall between this room and the corridor is built directly into a bookcase, bringing daylight into the corridor on one side and framing a view from the living room on the other.

Ceiling and wall planes were redrawn together, and lighting is layered at three heights – conical pendants over the dining table, a red wall sconce and under-cabinet strips at the middle level, and table lamps low down. Mineral-powder plaster, dark walnut veneer, and light oak stone-plastic flooring keep the palette restrained. Within it sit the owner’s books, beach stones, root sculptures, and a painting commissioned around the zodiac sign of the owner’s child.