Historic Preservation
Two To One House
By Clifford Pearson

Commissioned by a young businessman who was educated in the United States and now lives in both Hong Kong and Shanghai, Chang Bene Design took two European-style houses from the 1920s and combined them into one elegant residence. Although the architects made major changes on the inside of the buildings—creating a modern home with open, fluid spaces and contemporary style—they retained the spirit of the historic structures. Instead of trying to recreate old buildings, Chang Bene brought them alive by adapting them to modern living.

The original buildings sat next to each other in the French Concession, separated by a gap 2 meters wide and 4 meters deep. To connect the buildings both horizontally and vertically, Chang Bene inserted a new stairwell/foyer tower in the gap and topped it with a right-angled skylight that brings daylight into the center of the newly combined house. The circulation tower acts as a lantern at night when it helps light up the narrow alley from which visitors enter the new house. It also offers views of a large tree outside, which helps shade the glass during the summer.

The firm needed to make extensive structural alterations so floor levels in the two buildings matched each other. Although they kept the exteriors mostly intact, the architects did enlarge some windows and repair surfaces. With the two buildings combined, the new house offers about 325 square meters of space.

On the ground floor, the architects used a new dropped ceiling to create a large, unified space extending from the living room to the dining room across the width of the plan, with the kitchen and bathroom in the middle serving as a service core. Throughout the house, Chang Bene used the same gray bricks found in many other French Concession buildings, laying them with very little grout on walls, floors, and fireplaces. Upstairs, the architects opened up an unused attic above the master bedroom and converted it into a work area leading to a small roof terrace. In other places, they removed old ceilings to reveal existing wood beams.

“The house is really about intimate spaces—vignettes, not panoramas,” explains Shirley S. Chang, AIA, one of the principals of Hong-Kong-based Chang Bene Design. “We tried to provide the occupants with glimpses of trees and sky, a slit of sunlight here and there, as they move around the house,” she adds.

While she was designing the Shanghai house, Chang was also working on a Hong Kong house for the same client and sees the projects as siblings. Like brothers or sisters, the two residences show some family resemblances but have their own personalities. Both are conversions of existing buildings and modern in feeling. But each respects its original architecture and pays homage to the particular place it is set.