FHC Apartment
FHC Apartment is a minimalist residential interior located in Beijing, China, designed by BW Timeless. Brutalist architecture and luxury refinement rarely share the same conversation, yet the FHC Apartment positions this tension as its central design proposition. At 35 floors above Beijing’s central business district, the apartment inherits a raw structural honesty from its building’s original construction – exposed concrete wall elements that carry the weight of a specific architectural era – and uses that inheritance as a foundation rather than a problem to solve.
The panoramic city views function as a fifth elevation here, dissolving the boundary between interior space and the dense vertical fabric of Beijing below. Floor-to-ceiling glazing transforms the business district into a constantly shifting backdrop, which makes the interior’s material restraint all the more deliberate. BW Timeless chose to let the city do its visual work while the apartment itself operates on a quieter register.
The material palette is where the project’s sophistication becomes most legible. Lacquer, marble, and bleached wood each belong to a tradition of refined surface-making, but their placement against surviving concrete elements creates the kind of textural dialogue that rewards extended occupation. The bleached wood in particular – stripped of its warm chromatic associations – reads more as architectural surface than furniture material, aligning it with the white planes rather than distinguishing itself from them. This chromatic discipline is difficult to sustain and signals genuine restraint rather than decoration posing as minimalism.
Lighting is handled architecturally rather than decoratively, with fixtures calibrated to illuminate specific objects without announcing themselves. The approach draws from the long tradition of Japanese spatial thinking, where light is understood as a material in its own right – something that can reveal texture, suggest depth, or simply hold a room in stillness. Here it serves the curation directly, drawing attention to a selection of Chinese antiques and ancient stones that anchor the contemporary interior in a much longer cultural timeline.
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