Dehui Street

Taipei

The brief was unusual from the start: a home that works as an art studio, a studio that works as a home, and somewhere in all of it, room for several cats. The result is one of the most honest spaces in the portfolio — a place that doesn’t edit out who lives there.

The ceiling stays raw. Board-formed concrete, exposed conduit, a black track rail carrying adjustable spots — the industrial bones of the building are left visible because covering them would be a lie. Spanning the length of the room just below the ceiling is an elevated cat highway: grey steel brackets carrying pale oak planks, engineered for the cats’ use with the same care as anything else in the space. Wall-mounted climbing shelves lead up to it. A vermillion torii gate stands at the base. The cats have a genuine architectural program, and it’s not an afterthought.

The work table is the room’s center of gravity — a long solid oak slab on black steel trestles, seating eight, dressed with an articulated lamp and large enough to take on whatever the day requires. It sits in front of a full-width window wall looking onto the Taipei streetscape, the kind of window that makes an honest relationship with the city rather than framing a pretty view.

The kitchen announces its personality immediately: the floating shelves above the subway tile hold a dense, unironic collection of designer toys — SpongeBob, Darth Vader with red lightsaber, vinyl figures of various provenance — alongside pour-over equipment and glass jars. A pair of hand-blown glass pendants in amber-to-teal gradient hang above the oak bar counter. The encaustic tile on the kitchen and entry floor is patchwork: mixed Moroccan-influenced geometric patterns in blue, grey, and terracotta.

On the partition wall between kitchen and living zone, a large naive painting — clustered colorful houses, a waterfront, geometric forms — hangs at the height you’d give anything that matters. A Chewbacca Bearbrick stands near the door. A ginger cat sleeps in a round bed on the floor.

There is no gap between the life that happens here and the space that holds it.