FLUID STAIRCASE ANCHORS OPEN DESIGN
Hong Kong’s whimsical ‘Ribbon House’ features skylight directing light down to lowest levels
It started out as a renovation to an 11,000-square-foot home and its gardens, overlooking the South China Sea.
What it turned into was a fabulous and whimsical home that would make residents easily feel they had fallen down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Original plans were to build a staircase connecting the home’s four levels. But when architects discovered the openings in the floors and ceilings were not aligned, they treated it as a design opportunity and came up with the more fluid “ribbon” design of the stairs — thus, the Ribbon House.
The first level has four bedrooms, including the master bedroom, along with a rooftop space. The level below holds the living room, kitchen, garden facing the sea and the back garden next to the kitchen. There are two lower levels: the upper one is home to the garage, entertainment area and the maid’s quarters. The lower basement level has three more bedrooms, along with a gym area.
The staircase, which meanders down through the house, is widest at the basement level and tightens with narrower treads as it climbs to the rooftop. There is also a skylight, which sheds light all the way down to the two lowest levels of the home.
A seamless flow of rooms was the intent. The kitchen and dining area look onto the back garden, where residents can dine outdoors with a view of a vertical wall of plants. Folding glass doors between indoors and outdoors provide a more open feeling. Two of the guest bedrooms on the lowest level each glean additional light from their own private gardens.
Winner of the 2016 American Architecture Prize for Best House Interior, the design of the Ribbon House took two years and construction and was completed in 2013.
Johnny Wong, founder and creative director of FAK3 Architects in Hong Kong, answers a few questions about the Ribbon House.
What was the inspiration for the home?
The house was an existing old building located by the sea in Hong Kong, positioned discreetly on a slope. Our primary focus was to reconfigure the stairs, the windows . . . and redesign the interior. We wanted a more fluid and larger staircase to be the centrepiece and allow the residents a smoother and more comfortable transition vertically through the four levels.
By removing the existing staircase, we found that the openings in the floor and ceiling for the staircase to pass through were not aligned. As a result, our design is not a perfect helix or spiral, but a more organic ribbon-shaped structure that dances vertically through the house.
The ribbon staircase was our main idea driving the design, and we created strategic-framed views to the outside environment and internal spaces to enrich the experience of traversing the stairs.
By redesigning the new window openings, we wanted to create a spatial connection between the house’s interior to the exterior’s coastal context and allow more natural light and air into the house, especially the basement, by using a stairwell/staircase as a funnel for light.
What type of feeling did you want to create for residents?
Our goal was to create a contemporary and clean design, giving the house a sense of lightness. We also wanted to open up the house to the sea and nature. How does the stairwell draw light to the basement?
The stairs weave through all four levels of the house from the glass roof stairwell to the basement, bringing light down to the lower levels.
What were the challenges in designing and building it?
We developed many 3-D computergenerated studies of the ribbon stairs’ shape and built smaller-scale physical models to understand in more depth the complexity of the form before fabricating the actual stairs in steel.
The steel fabrication was done off-site and then moved to the site in large sections, along with the welded base, to form a structure 12 metres high by three metres. This process took about six months. Then, the experienced carpenters started to clad the steel structure in wood to add the final touches and to refine the shape of the ribbon stairs.