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Muji's Shared Apartment Concept: Cantilevered Wooden Caves for Bedrooms

Designed by Japanese architect Go Hasegawa, the space is intended to be occupied by co-workers, not family members

By Rain Noe - October 8, 2018

in Architecture

For Beijing Design Week, Muji presented an apartment prototype at the House Vision exhibition. Designed by Japanese architect Go Hasegawa, the concept is hypothetically intended to house four Muji employees at their Shanghai office; in other words, it's not a family dwelling, but something that four individuals with privacy needs are intended to share.

That's factor one. Factor two is that many of Shanghai's residential buildings, in which this concept would theoretically be constructed, have a plurality of odd 4-meter-tall spaces on the upper floors. These airy spaces are rather taller than proper one-story spaces, yet not tall enough to create a proper second level.

To deal with these two things, Hasegawa opted to have the bulk of the space devoted to a communal kitchen/living area...

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...with something like glorified lofted beds taking up the dead air above and stretching out from a central core. The four elevated wood-clad, cave-like structures each hold a bed and storage units for personal effects.

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In keeping with both the cantilever theme and Muji's minimalist style, a plank of wood protruding horizontally from this bedroom wall can be used as a small desk, if you sit on the floor and dangle your legs over the doorway. I take this to mean each of the bedrooms has their own door and staircase, though admittedly it's not clear from the photos.

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Also not clear is if the bedroom-caves are open-ended, or sealed off with a large piece of glass. They appear open-ended to me. That might make for some exciting episodes when you wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.

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One interesting detail, as seen in the shot below, is that the shelves in at least one of the bedrooms do not have any rear surface--they're open-air. I can't deny that lends the room an airy feel, but if I lived there the floor below would probably be littered with my shattered belongings.