Young designers, Zhang Yufan and Ha Da, who established their interior design studio, NA-DECO in Nanjing City, China, in 2015, took on a tough challenge recently: to re-design a fairly basic apartment for an artist couple who had very clear ideas of what they wanted.

The 132 square-metre (1,420 sq.ft) apartment was built in 2016 and it is located in the downtown area of Hohhot City, the regional capital of Inner Mongolia Region in China.

The clients? wishes were clear but they were not simple or easy to fulfil. The artists did not want major structural changes to the apartment, and they wanted their home to reflect the Mongolian spirit and ancient culture.

Ha Da explains that the first was relatively easy. ?We did not break any original walls,? he says. ?We just heightened the door frame, added some architectural details and, most importantly, added curving walls.?  The curving walls are, indeed, very important and they are also part of the designers? response to the second part of the clients? request.

Ha Da elaborates: ?How to deliver the Mongolian spirit in a single place" ? This challenged us a lot. But, after a lot of thinking, we decided to reference Mongolian music which has a distant rhythm, a touching feeling, and it can easily make people homesick.?

From this the designers deduced some key words that describe the Mongolian spirit: simple, deep, nostalgic and a little mysterious.

To translate this into the space, they used vintage colours of s...