673 Weihai Road, a small four-story apartment building with no name, along the street entrance next to a milk tea shop, is easy to rub shoulders with if you don't want to look for it. On the map, 673 Weihai Road is a narrow stretch sandwiched between the Civic High School and the Sun Apartments. Our project site is a residential complex located on the second floor of the building.

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It has no name, and in fact it is not enough, because it is adjacent to the excellent historical building Sun Apartment, which people call it the “Little Sun Apartment”. The front door of the apartment is unobtrusive, but there are no holes in the doorway: the mosaic floor between the white and green rooms, the rustic and beautiful cast-iron stair railing, a watermill base formed in the form of an integral part of the building. Every detail, every arc, reminds you that it belongs to the old days and the exquisite construction of that era Process level.
Today, when it is difficult to find a one-room apartment in the city center, it is difficult to imagine such a national building located in the heart of the city center, with a property that has been idle for almost a decade. Our project, which is wonderful, has such an experience. For this reason, when we first visited the site, we felt as if we had entered an amber that stopped the passage of time, a small apartment of sixty square meters that perfectly preserved various traces of history from the thirties of the first century to the early nineties.

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Most striking are the ceiling and cornices at the top of the bedroom, which age like a warm plaster fossil. Bedroom wall filled with cloth light blue base indigo thread wheat wheat leaf continuous pattern, Arts and Crafts style. Amazingly, the fine pattern seems to be printed directly on the wall. We found no wallpaper media such as paper or fabric in the cut of the wall that we removed from the wall and in the cut of the wall that we later removed. After most of the walls have undergone secondary painting, the pattern on the bottom is still clearly visible. It was also the first time we met such a museum-level antique wall. We can't help wondering what the building was originally used for, who lived here, and what kind of story happened?

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The landlord told us that the landlord grew up in this apartment and has now settled overseas. With no one to take care of it, the house is always empty. The living room underwent a simple painting renovation in about the nineties, but the bedroom, toilet and kitchen have basically retained their original appearance decades ago. The original furniture styles in the rooms span a wide range from the early 30s to the late 90s. The manufacturing years of cupboards, cabinets, desks, and wardrobes are different from the early 30s to the late 90s.
The afternoon sun shines on the ruined-like site. Between the streams of light, the mottled walls radiate a fascinating life and charm, as if it were a surviving body that had just undergone the baptism of its time. In this way, we have created a sense of responsibility and compassion for this site. By design, it is necessary to preserve the details of history, traces of time, so that you can see what we see today, the history of houses, the stories of houses without candles.

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The landlord's requirements for the Weihai Road scheme are very clear: to redevelop the house into a livable luxury apartment, thus renting to the right tenants. Therefore, the design first needs to meet basic residential needs. And how to enhance the space experience while fulfilling the function, as well as preserving the narrative (historical detail) of the house as much as possible, is the focus of our research.
In the morning, the sun falls from the bedroom window; at noon, the sun moves to the living room; in the evening, the west-sloping sunlight enters from the balcony. Our design begins with the observation of light.
The house is 3.5 meters high, with tall windows, good lighting, and a separate outdoor balcony. Unfortunately, almost a third of the room is occupied by the enclosed kitchen, kitchen vestibule, bedroom cloakroom and laundry room. Excessively segregated space makes the indoor experience boring.

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After the construction party examined the original structure, we decided to demolish the entire partition wall from the living room to the bedroom, freeing up the original space. Embed the needs of cooking and storage into the space with open kitchens and wall cabinets. The pediment still exists, but it is no longer separated from the living room by a door. A shower was added to the toilet, and the layout and area also changed accordingly. While meeting owners' needs one by one, we've created a new space experience.
We have kept all the top lines of the living room and bedroom. But because the scope of the new open kitchen is much wider than the original kitchen, the original top corner line connecting the kitchen and living room had to be carefully removed and moved to a new location. The bedroom ceiling, that beautiful piece of plaster fossils, we did a careful and careful cleaning as if we were treating a relic, except that there was no further treatment. All wooden floors and kick corners are also kept down. In some places there were no kick corners, and we filled in the gaps with a kick corner line from the small space we removed.

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There are many other uses of decking in the space: the bedroom door and the toilet door are all former kitchen doors; the chandelier in the bedroom comes from the living room; the cupboard in the living room is actually the original closet; the glass cabinet at the entrance, also from the cabinet, we just changed the glass. The two pieces were later praised by the exchange of beautiful old furniture, neither of which we did not do any processing, not even the handles were changed, just a simple cleaning. Who would have thought that at the beginning of construction they were almost thrown away as waste.
The real flower kung fu treatment is the only three doors left: the original entrance door, the bedroom and the toilet door. We found that all the doors had been painted over and over, with one coat of paint underneath, often hiding another. During construction, we ask the construction party to grind the door repeatedly as required until we achieve the result we satisfy. In the end, some of them retain the paint of the surface completely, some have a mottled texture consisting of the lower layer and the next layer of paint. The whole door looks like a whole slice of the ground, revealing the history of the house's transformation.
THE KITCHEN AND HALLWAY FLOOR IS HAND-BRICKED, ALSO TO MATCH THE HISTORIC FEEL OF THE HOUSE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. Unfortunately, the original bedroom wall could not be preserved due to sanitary and safety reasons. Finally, an artistic paint with a touch of handmade texture was chosen to continue the thought on the details.

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We wanted to keep one of the walls of the old bathroom, because the mottled texture is beautiful. Unfortunately, after an inspection, we found that the wall had decayed and only had to be completely demolished. Also all the windows that were demolished due to corruption.
Although a lot of similar work has been done to reproduce scenes, these recreated scenes are not a historical restoration, but rather a kind of vision and imagination of old life entwined with the aesthetics of the times. So where to use new materials, we do not hesitate. Cabinets and wardrobes, using economical and easy to clean sheets, and the kitchen bar counter in Nakajima uses mirrored stainless steel as a countertop. This is an addition of a highly reflective modern material that has a hidden property that emphasizes and amplifies the historical elements of the house.
The Weihai Road private house was completed shortly, and the owner came to make it truly come back to life. The occupant is two partners of Single Person, a second-hand home jewelry store. With their unique insight and aesthetics into the home, they gradually added many of their private collections to the interior during their residence. Our project took place six months after their stay, and all the furniture and soft furnishings in the photo came from their pens. It is they who give this space the soul of home.

In our eyes, the interior design of the old building is not a restoration of heritage, but rather a curation. All the historical details preserved and highlighted are carefully selected exhibits that represent our understanding and focus on beauty. Most importantly, this exhibition is to be able to live in and allow people to enjoy life in peace. As designers, our job is to weave an old daydream where modern people can sleep peacefully so that today's encounters can understand and fall in love with this new and old intersection.
After all, only when a new life begins here, can this space of old days continue to grow and continue the shadowy story that belongs to it.
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Project Information
Project Name: Weihai Road Old House
Designer: Offhand Practice
Project Design & Completion Year Design Time: 2018.05 — 2018.06
Construction time: 2018.07 — 2018.09
Founder and design team: Yuan Gan
Project Address: 673 Weihai Road, Jing'an District, Shanghai
Building Size: 60m²
Photo copyright: Gao Yi Tsing & Hu Yen-yun
Partner：Shanghai Yue Special Decoration Design Engineering Co., Ltd
Client: Hidden Group
Brand: Wall & Ceiling: Art Paint (Shanghai Yancheng Industrial Co., Ltd.)
Handmade bricks and mosaics: Shanghai Kaiju Decoration Materials Co., Ltd.
Soft Pack: Single Person
Design content: interior, lighting
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