When One Designer Built an Office for Another Designer | 100 People With Ideas

After finishing the office, he moved into his friend's company too.

Lin Congran and Hou Zhengguang have moved together into a big loft in Shanghai's M50 art district.

Lin Congran is 38 and works in architecture; Hou Zhengguang is 43 and makes furniture. Most people only find out what an architect has been working on the day the building is finished and put to use. But with Eastern design all the rage now, you may have noticed Hou Zhengguang's furniture brand, Duoshao. The pieces are solid wood, plain and simple in form; you can see traces of traditional Chinese furniture in them, and they still sit comfortably in a modern room.

Hou Zhengguang's design company, Muma, had to relocate, and he asked his good friend Lin Congran for help. The site they picked had been a textile factory, and it still carried the raw, unfinished feel of industrial-era concrete — not an obvious fit for Hou Zhengguang, who came out of furniture and interior design and chases detail to an extreme.

This is Muma's tenth year in design. From product, brand and space design to creative work, interactive media and advertising, its business lines have grown as the range of services kept extending. Working from the idea that integrating design services creates more value for clients, Hou Zhengguang invited partners from different business lines to join on a collaborative, shared basis, and set up a new company called Yiqi Design. He hoped that moving into the new headquarters would carry that spirit of collaboration and sharing to partners and clients alike, turning the space into an energy field where different links in the design chain, and different people, could spark each other.

The new office runs to more than a thousand square meters and still feels like a factory. Keeping the flavor of the original space while making it easy and comfortable to be in was what Lin Congran and Hou Zhengguang agreed on. The two had worked together many times before, and Lin Congran had designed houses for friends, but designing for a designer turned out to be no easier than designing for anyone else.

A Process of Deliberation and Torment

"It was a process of testing and tormenting each other," Lin Congran said. "I found the biggest clashes were over materials."

At first, the main material Lin Congran chose for the interior was red lauan, prized for its natural color and grain and a hint of old Shanghai — but across nearly a thousand square meters it would have cost far too much. While they were still turning over what to use instead, Hou Zhengguang dug a batch of plywood panels out of the warehouse. The two talked it over and decided to lay the stairs with it and face the walls with it, using the batch for all it was worth. The final scheme, plywood against concrete, produced something else nobody had planned: the natural marks left by cutting the wood, set against the rough concrete of floor, ceiling and walls, made the whole place feel plainer and more natural still.

The effect came without anyone designing it. But Hou Zhengguang, whose feel for materials borders on severe, still had his own ideas and held to them in the details, and that pushed Lin Congran to experiment alongside him. Few people notice the two walls in the entrance corridor, or the odd treatment of the wall beside the elevator — they are built up layer by layer out of plywood panels, and the grain left by the saw is still plain to see. "That isn't how we did it at first. For me, this kind of coffee-colored wood flooring would probably have solved the whole thing. But Hou Zhengguang came and told me he wanted a cut face like this, so I got the workers to go and learn how," Lin Congran said.

The same sparking and clashing shows up in the lighting. Walking through the central work area on the first floor, you notice the lights overhead are unusual: instead of rows of parallel tubes, they form a grid that neatly dodges the shadows thrown by the concrete columns, so the light falls evenly and softly across the room. "Left to myself, I probably wouldn't have thought to go into this much detail — including the way the office hides its lighting. Under these wooden beams it's all indirect light, which makes it a little more comfortable to be in," Lin Congran told the reporter.

Keeping the Space True to Itself

Anyone walking into Yiqi's new headquarters is likely to be pulled toward the wooden staircase that cuts across the space. Two forces gather there, one going up, one going down, with a glass room hung in the vertical void between them. Lin Congran still remembers how the sheer size of the place hit him the first time he saw it: bare factory surfaces, paint flaking off some of the load-bearing columns to show the raw color of old concrete underneath — the marks of time grinding over the place, and the most captivating thing about it.

It needed little added to it. Both men felt that keeping the space true to itself and designing from what was already there was the right call. To bring the factory back to how it once worked, they went to great lengths to strip the paint from the columns and clear away parts nobody needed, exposing the site's original texture. Plain concrete, paired with coffee-colored flooring, tea-colored glass and black ironwork — these simplest of elements, set against each other, shaped the whole mood.

What people do here became the liveliest element in the space, and the staff hold its best spot. "Why did we hand this big open void to everyone working here? To show the value of the designers themselves. All the managers' offices sit up on the beams or off to the sides," Lin Congran said.

Lin Congran and Hou Zhengguang went back and forth many times over how to divide the office from everything else, and in the end they took the wooden staircase scheme. Partly it was about saving material and using it well; partly the big wooden stair, joined to the entrance hall, split the whole floor into reception, meeting and work areas, while lesser things — meeting rooms, restrooms, storage — were tucked neatly underneath.

A full 12 meters wide, the staircase is like a stage. Every time someone crosses it, the energy of those two movements, one up and one down, fills the space with life and flow, and the path from front to back and back to front again makes for an interesting switch of view.

Both men think the best state for a space is to let it show life as it actually is. "There are more than 100 people here, and each has their own working habits and moods. The way they naturally work already makes up the rich expression of the space; nothing else needs filling in. Make a space too refined and a lot of behavior gets fixed in place, holding to a high-quality but controlled state. We believe every person is independent, and should be given the simplest possible space to use freely."

QDaily: How did your work with Hou Zhengguang first start?

Lin Congran: I liked Duoshao's furniture first, and that's how I got to know Hou Zhengguang and Muma. We'd done a few things together before this project — they were short on space and architecture design, and we'd sometimes need furniture, and he'd give us resources too, so we could support each other. All of it has been built on friendship, and that's still true today.

QDaily: My impression is that Muma hasn't done architecture projects before.

Lin Congran: Fundamentally, they have that need. The architecture work actually comes in through the furniture side: say a hotel client buys a lot of their furniture and starts trusting their taste — next time, that client might bring them in at a very early stage of the hotel's design. When the need is there, the business is easy to win. Clients care more and more about what actually gets built as things go on. Say you check into a hotel: at first you notice the overall feel and the layout of the lobby, but once you're staying there you start caring about how the toilet works and what brand the bedding is. After a night, you might care more about the pastries and how fine the service is. Every part of it matters, and the design is all connected — you can't say which came first, the chicken or the egg.

QDaily: Why did the job end up with you moving in to work here together? Does the friendship make you more relaxed?

Lin Congran: We'd designed offices before, mostly for brands, where they needed the space to tell a brand story, with some exaggerated shapes and decoration. But Hou Zhengguang built this platform unselfishly. When he rented the office he already knew there would never be enough people to fill it at once, but he thought it was worth trying — using an internet way of thinking to gather everyone together. I backed that idea.

For us to actually do it, we had to bring the space back to its truest state; we didn't want to speak through a very strong design. In practice there was a lot to weigh — he had his ideas, I had mine, and in the end we simply got to a point both of us thought was best. The rational control of construction cost, the flexibility of how the space is used: everyone liked it, and felt it could stand for a designer. So you'll notice that once you're inside there isn't much showing off, or much excess feeling. We wanted to get back to the state in which a person feels most comfortable.

A lot of the ideas and the shared understanding built up slowly through the design — including how the business grew and how we work. Our old studio was in an old Western-style house near Jing'an Temple, four or five of us, with our own little courtyard. But as we went on we grew attached to this space, and found this way of working good too: everyone sparking each other, sharing teams, technology, resources. Hou Zhengguang later joked to me, "We're both plenty badass on our own, but together we're even more badass." I like working in teams myself, and I think this way of doing business — helping each other out, keeping it personal — suits Eastern temperament pretty well.

QDaily: What are you designing these days?

Lin Congran: We recently had a project, the lifestyle hall at the Himalayas Hotel in Pudong. That building was designed by Arata Isozaki, and his concept at the time was a modern garden. But when we took the floor plan out to the site, there were a lot of big curved columns — can you use straight lines in a place like that? You can't. So we used curves, because those objects were already in the space, and you have to respect them, face them; the columns grew that way to begin with. Our design leaves room to move, but it has its own logic. For an interior, we build on the state the space is already in; for a building, we design from the hills, the water, the nature that's already there. I'm not an architect out to express a strong personal style — I just see certain things within that state and follow them through.