Project Overview

Smart Zendo is a Hong Kong apartment featuring clever storage solutions, smart technology, transformable spaces - all designed to engender the Zen ethos within its inhabits.

Organisation

Sim-Plex Design Studio

Project Brief

Urbanites are busy in working and they always eager to have a decent and quiet living space as an escape. "Zen" is a spiritual state that pursues inner peace and harmony. It is the healing agent that washes the mind and irritability. Moreover, the tremendous workload of urbanites also made it impossible to manage their homes. In recent years, smart home is introduced to control and improve the situation.

The owner of the apartment are a busy young couple, Eric and Lory. Sim-Plex uses the concept of the Zendo to bring the view of the scenery outside the window into the house. The integrated TV cabinet wall and the wooden floor platform are plain and warm, but yet there were a large number of intelligent devices hidden by. The design is also integrated to the traditional Feng Shui doctrine, to create a spiritual space where tradition and technology, people and scenery are combined.

Project Innovation/Need

Sim-Plex lifts up the entire living room with wooden platform, and so that every corner can also sit down at will; in addition to a large amount of storage, the platform also hides the intelligent lifting coffee table, create a gathering point, sometimes as a tea ceremony, and sometimes as a toy’s playground; the dining room is made up of an open kitchen with a quartz stone high-top dining table and two arc-angle storage chairs, so no matter while cooking or dining, you could also enjoy the scenery outside the window; the windowsills of the two rooms are surrounded by wooden frames to match the natural scenery.

Haiku, the Japanese poetry, is deeply influenced by Zen. There are “season languages" in the haiku. The Smart Zendo in this case is just like the seasonal language, and the four seasons of the scenery outside the window are introduced into the room to make the perfect merging of home and nature, so that the emotions of the homestay can be fermented.

The unique feature of this project is that although a large number of hardware smart functions are combined: such as voice-activated synthesisers, various lamp systems and air-conditioning switches, curtain opening, lifting coffee tables, projection screens, electronic door locks, etc., remote control greatly saves the owner's time. At the same time, most of the design uses the natural materials to create a picture of the scenery. In the view of traditional Feng Shui, this project also refers to its relevant doctrine and adjusts accordingly.