A master suite in a new Kaohsiung tower, handed over as a bare concrete shell with one long window and an awkward structural downstand across the ceiling.
Lumen Interior Works turned the downstand into the organising element. A curved cove now wraps the ceiling perimeter, rounding into the corner instead of meeting it, and hiding a warm LED strip that traces the room’s outline after dark. The beam disappears into the radius. In the photograph the cove is the brightest line in the frame, and everything below it has been kept flat and quiet so that it stays that way.
The bed is upholstered in a sand-coloured velvet and flanked by fluted timber panels that step down into low integrated nightstands. Rather than sit the bed against the window wall, the studio floated it on the long blank wall, which gives the sleeper the view on waking and keeps the glazing free of furniture. Bedding is white with a heavy grey-green wool blanket folded across the foot.
The dressing zone runs along the right-hand wall: a slim vanity with a honed black stone top, an arched brass-framed mirror, a fluted half-column that conceals the wardrobe return, and a small upholstered ottoman in olive. The vanity light is daylight, borrowed from the window opposite, which the studio treated as a requirement rather than a preference.
Window treatment is layered. Fixed aluminium louvres cut the low western sun that Kaohsiung delivers for most of the year, and a grey linen drape closes over them at night. The floor is a large-format stone-look porcelain in a pale bone tone, chosen for the humidity and for the way it holds the cove light.
A single boucle armchair sits by the window. There is no rug, no artwork, and no colour beyond the olive ottoman and the grey blanket.
The jury found the ceiling detailing accomplished and the plan sensible, and noted that the suite solves a common developer-shell problem with a single move. It stopped short of a higher placement because the furniture selection, while well judged, follows a familiar contemporary template rather than proposing anything of its own.
Lumen Interior Works is a Kaohsiung practice of nine, working across southern Taiwan on residential fit-outs and small hospitality projects. The office runs its own site supervision team, which is unusual at its scale and shows in the finish quality of its ceiling and joinery work. Founded in 2015 by Ping-Han Ke and Yu-Chen Lai, both formerly with larger Taipei firms. The studio's stated focus is daylight planning in high-rise apartments, where orientation is fixed and the only remaining variables are shading and surface. It maintains a shading library covering the common tower orientations in Kaohsiung and Tainan, built from its own site measurements over eight years, and shares it with clients during the design phase.