This three-storey family home turns a designer’s own life—commute stress, growing children, shifting priorities—into a living experiment in elegance, playfulness, and meaning in everyday space.
Located in central Beijing, this 300-square-metre, three-storey stacked villa is both the home and design manifesto of CUN DESIGN’s lead designer, Cui Shu. The project answers a very specific brief: to create a serene spiritual highland in the heart of a busy commercial district, and to precisely fit a family’s life as the parents move from their thirties into their forties. In doing so, it also quietly tests a series of modern home design ideas about how a contemporary family really lives together in the city.
Cui calls this evolving life pattern a “residential state,” and the design methodology that responds to it “State-ism.” For this home, State-ism is framed by three principles: Elegance, Playfulness, and Meaning. Verticality is a core condition of the three-storey villa, so movement between floors becomes the main narrative thread of design, borrowing thinking more often seen in luxury apartment interiors and translating it into a stacked family house.
Elegance is understood as ambience rather than style. Drawing from contemporary Chinese aesthetics, the house uses clear geometric forms as the “body,” and borrows tones and textures from ink painting—rice paper, ink wash, seal red—to create a quiet, montage-like Chinese spirit. Under gentle light, these textured wall finishes and a warm neutral living room palette capture fleeting daily moments and distil them into a lasting atmosphere that can flex with changing scenes.
Playfulness is treated as the soul of the space. The staircase is designed as the home’s spine and artery, slowing the pace between levels and turning the vertical journey into a ritual of return—from public on the first floor, to family on the second, to introspection on the third. The conventional TV-centered living room is replaced by a generous kitchen island that anchors cooking, homework, conversation, and gatherings, allowing functions to blur and family life to improvise daily—an approach that resonates strongly with current family home interior design. Natural Italian beige stone, hand-troweled wall finishes, layered statement lighting ideas, and barefoot circulation transform material contrasts into an immersive, bodily sense of play.
Meaning emerges when Elegance and Playfulness ferment over time. Storage, walls, and shelves are reserved for the family’s cookware, children’s drawings, and personal collections, turning the home into a vessel of irreplaceable memories. Carefully placed indoor plants for the living room and stair hall soften the geometry and bring a calm biophilic layer into everyday life. Supported by systems from Geberit, HV, Morgan, RARA, Haro, Benmoo, EUROART, and Ye Wu Garden, the house is conceived not as a finished object, but as a living organism that grows with its residents.
Photo courtesy of Zou Jibo
