A Resort-Inspired Loft on The Bund
In a 1930s Art Deco block on the Shanghai Bund, this antique collector’s apartment by French designer Baptiste Bohu pays homage to local architectural heritage
Overlooking the historic Bund in Shanghai, this spacious one-bedroom loft is the second home of an antique collector, intended to host out-of-town visitors and entertain guests, but also to be a space to showcase part of the owner’s collection.
‘We wanted to recreate the feeling of an old house, not a trendy loft but something with the spirit of old Shanghai,’ French designer Baptiste Bohu says of the apartment, which is in a 1930s Art Deco block by the Suzhou Creek, China’s first high-rise condominium. Still, after countless alterations, including subdivisions into smaller units, the apartment lost all its original features. ‘It looks original, but we re-did everything, from the iron windows and stucco mouldings to the Art Deco patterns on the air conditioner’s grill.’ Bohu also studied the original blueprint to bring the apartment back to its modernist layout: a diamond-shaped open plan of interconnected rooms.
The apartment’s corner location allows for extraordinary views seen through large, curved windows. Pristine white walls emphasise the view and invite the landscape in, while the mint-green colour used for the teak door frames sets the overall tone — a move inspired by the homes the owner saw on his travels in Sri Lanka.
The neutral colour palette contrasts with the wooden tones of the furniture and cabinetry. Bohu did little shopping for this project, since the client already owned most of the pieces, having acquired them from auction houses like Christie’s, which is a stone’s throw away, across the river. His collection is housed in a different apartment, a treasure trove of sorts, where Bohu simply had to pick his favourite items.
The decor features two opium beds, one with a canopy and carved sides in the bedroom, and a luohan bed with cabriole legs in the tearoom. Other classical items, such as horseshoe chairs, altar tables, cabinets, chests and stools, compose the ambience. The two fireplaces weren’t originally part of the apartment, but they are authentic, brought in from houses in the Former French Concession.
‘The plan is wide open, but you have this illusion of separate rooms, which is really interesting,’ says Bohu, adding that the space allowed for more rooms, but he ‘opted for an ample suite instead, with an oversized bathroom to convey the feeling of a resort-style home.’ Showing reverence for the local vernacular with simplicity and timelessness, this Bund apartment makes for an ideal urban retreat.
Text / Tomás Pinheiro
Images / Michael Zhao
