Urban apartment design faces a persistent challenge: how to fit a family’s full range of daily activities into a compact footprint without making the space feel cramped. The traditional solution of dividing floor area into small dedicated rooms sacrifices openness and natural light. An alternative approach, demonstrated in a 90 square meter apartment in Taipei, strips interior divisions down to bare essentials and lets residents define spaces through use rather than walls. This project by a Toronto- and Columbia-trained architect offers practical lessons for anyone considering how modern residential design blends historical architectural principles with contemporary family needs.
The Open Concept Approach to Urban Apartment Design
Open concept layouts remove walls between living, dining, and kitchen areas to create a single shared volume. In a 90 square meter apartment, this approach produces a room that feels roughly two to three times as spacious as the same square footage carved into separate rooms. The visual continuity lets light travel deeper into the floor plate and allows family members to see and hear each other across the full width of the home.
Spatial Efficiency in Numbers
| Design Element | The KOA Apartment | Function |
|---|---|---|
| Total Area | 90 m² (969 sq ft) | Completely open, no internal walls |
| Central Countertop | 3.5 meters long | Dining, work surface, gathering point |
| Window System | Deep-recessed perimeter band | Northern light by day, privacy by night |
| Sanitary Block | Geometric freestanding volumes | Sculptural enclosure for bathroom functions |
| Storage | Hidden recessed cabinetry | Minimizes visual clutter |
The open approach eliminates the 8 to 12 percent of square footage typically consumed by hallways and circulation passages in conventional apartment layouts. That reclaimed space goes directly into usable living area. For projects that push nature-integrated architecture and passive house principles further, the elimination of interior partitions also improves cross-ventilation and passive cooling strategies.
When Open Concept Works Best
Open plans function best in households where activities overlap rather than requiring strict separation. A parent cooking dinner can watch children doing homework at the table. A toddler playing on the floor stays within sight of someone reading on the sofa. The KOA design takes this logic to its extreme by making the entire 90 square meters a single room, with only the bathroom enclosed for privacy and plumbing.
Window Design as Spatial Transformer
The window treatment in this apartment departs from typical punched openings. Instead of individual windows distributed across the facade, a continuous band of deep-recessed windows wraps three or four sides of the perimeter. During daytime, these apertures admit consistent northern light, which produces even illumination without the harsh shadows of direct southern exposure. The depth of the recess creates a ledgelike surface that can hold books, plants, or small objects without requiring separate shelving.
At night, the windows transform. The deep recesses accept sliding panels or curtains that close to create private sleeping quarters, effectively turning portions of the open room into temporary bedrooms. This dual-use strategy means a space that serves as living room during the day can become a parent’s sleeping area at night without needing a separate door or partition. The approach recalls strategies seen in Gothic Revival architecture, where deep window embrasures created both light wells and defensible interior zones, adapted here for modern family needs.
Light Quality and Wellbeing
Studies in environmental psychology consistently link access to natural daylight with improved mood and sleep regulation. Northern light provides a color temperature around 5,500 to 6,500 Kelvin, close to standard daylight, which supports accurate color perception for tasks like reading and cooking. The continuous band arrangement means no part of the apartment falls into deep shadow, even on overcast days.
- Northern exposure produces consistent light levels throughout the day
- Deep recesses reduce glare by creating a buffer zone at the window plane
- The sill depth becomes usable surface for daily objects
- Closing panels at night converts window zone into private sleeping area
The Central Countertop as Multi-Functional Anchor
At the center of the open volume sits a 3.5-meter countertop that the architects describe as the anchor of the space. This single element serves as dining table, work desk, children’s activity surface, and social gathering point. Its position at the center rather than against a wall means people can circulate around it from all sides, which reduces the bottleneck effect that occurs when furniture is pushed to the perimeter of an open room.
Multi-Functional Furniture Principles
The countertop’s success comes from three design decisions that apply to any compact apartment.
- Central positioning: the table occupies the middle of the room, not the edge, which makes it equally accessible from every zone
- Generous length: 3.5 meters accommodates a family of four plus guests without feeling cramped
- Abstract form: the countertop reads as a sculptural object rather than a specific piece of furniture, which lets it adapt to different uses over time
This strategy of choosing one large, well-placed element over several smaller pieces mirrors how architecture firms advancing passive house design prioritize building envelope performance over multiple separate mechanical systems. One well-designed solution outperforms several partial ones.
Designing for Families Without Defined Rooms
The KOA apartment’s brief came directly from its residents, a young couple with two small children. They asked for a home where sleeping, seating, eating, and sanitary activities were stripped to bare essentials so the children would have maximum space to move freely. The architects responded by eliminating all non-structural interior walls and assigning each function a material zone rather than a walled room.
Privacy Without Walls
The sleeping areas in this apartment are defined by the window recess system described earlier, not by walls or doors. The couple’s sleeping zone occupies one side of the open room, their children’s space another. At night the window panels close for visual privacy. During the day they open to rejoin the unified space. This system works because the family agreed on the trade-off: less visual privacy during waking hours in exchange for significantly more play and movement space.
Even the sanitary block, which requires enclosure for plumbing and privacy, is treated as a geometric volume within the larger room rather than a conventional bathroom. The toilet, shower, and washbasin are arranged as distinct sculptural forms that the architects describe as a play of geometric volume and framed-view composition. This approach is the inverse of the classic six apartment layout found in pre-war New York architecture, where rooms are strictly compartmentalized and each has a defined purpose dictated by its dimensions and door placement.
Compact Luxury Through Selective Materiality
Luxury in a compact open apartment comes from material quality rather than square footage. The KOA design treats furniture as sculptural pieces within the space, describing the countertop, cabinets, and seating as resembling stone slab, woodblock, and clay. Each piece is isolated visually so it reads as an object in a gallery rather than functional clutter.
The hidden cabinetry follows the same principle. By recessing storage behind flush panels, the architects prevent visual noise that would compete with the clean lines of the open volume. The deep recessed windows, hidden cabinets, and central countertop together create a space that the owners describe as a modern gallery: simple, calm, and filled with light, with room left for the imagination to fill in the details.
This selective approach to materials and finishes means the apartment can use higher-quality surfaces than a larger home with the same budget. The money saved by not building interior walls goes toward better stone for the countertop, finer cabinetry hardware, and more carefully considered lighting. The same principle applies to the treatment of the sanitary fixtures. Placing them as freestanding sculptural volumes rather than tucking them into a conventional bathroom allows each element to receive design attention it would not get in a standard layout. The approach mirrors how pre-war apartment architecture mixed styles through historic preservation and modern renovation, treating each design intervention as a deliberate addition rather than a default solution.
Translating These Principles to Other Projects
Homeowners and designers working on compact urban apartments can apply the same strategies without replicating the Taipei project exactly. The core principles are:
- Eliminate dedicated hallways and redistribute that square footage to living zones
- Choose one large central element over several small distributed pieces
- Use window design to transform spaces between day and night functions
- Invest material budget in fewer, better surfaces rather than spreading it thin
- Treat storage as an invisible utility removed from the visual field
A 90 square meter apartment that follows these principles can feel dramatically larger than its metric equivalent in a conventionally divided floor plan. The difference is not in the square footage but in how the space is perceived and used. For homeowners seeking high-end finishes in compact footprints, understanding how luxury apartment design draws on historical architecture to meet ultra-high-end market requirements provides useful context for material and spatial decisions that elevate a small space beyond its nominal dimensions.