Contemporary Asian Living Rooms. Chami Jotisalikorn

      contemporary living rooms:

       embracing the new global chic

      From Bangkok to Bali, a relaxed new mood in contemporary living is steering the shapes and textures that form today's Asian living rooms. In luxury homes and design hotels across the region, seating is invitingly low-slung and laid back; cushions are deep and abundant; a heightened appreciation for air and light prevails. The new Asian living room beckons as a refuge from the jumbled cacophony of modern urban life. The new serenity to be found in living room spaces conveys the search for a sense of peace and order in our interior world, almost as if in response to the increasing unpredictability of the world beyond the walls of our home. Featured in the pages of this book are some of the most stylish living rooms across Southeast Asia, revealing how the formal elegance of pre-millennial living and entertaining has been replaced by a new desire for easy relaxation. The contemporary living room is a place that is meant to invite, not intimidate.

      Traditionally, the key aspect of the tropical Asian living room is its relationship with the surrounding environment. Indeed, the distinction between western and tropical Asian living rooms lies in their opposing attitudes toward the external environment. In western homes, the living room is the space that shows the family's public face to visitors, a space that conveys status. One enters a European house through a formal entrance hall, then through doors leading into other rooms. The doors are functional, as they keep cold blasts of wintry air from chilling the rooms inside the house. It is no surprise then that the western living room centers on a hearth for warmth and comfort, enclosing people inside and protecting them from the harsher elements outside.

      In the balmy climes of tropical Asia, the opposite rules prevail. In the mostly open-air lifestyles of Southeast Asia, there is hardly a formal front door, let alone any sort of formal entrance hall. The living room, or any communal social area in traditional Asian houses is open to the outdoors on all sides, or consists of a roofed pavilion with no walls, like the Indonesian bale or the Thai sala. The concept of living in tropical Asia embraces the outdoors as part of the living space, designed to incorporate cooling breezes and cross ventilation to ease the searing heat. The outdoor verandah is an important part of the tropical Asian living room too, as seen most clearly in the classic Thai stilt house, where the living room and verandah are one and the same. More modern examples show how the region's leading architects, including Geoffrey Bawa and Peter Muller, have understood this aspect of tropical Asian architecture: both architects pioneered the concept of incorporating the outdoors in contemporary architecture in their residential and hotel designs in Sri Lanka and Bali. In some traditional tropical Asian homes, the living and entertaining area opens up to a central garden so that the vista becomes part of the interior design element. Like the hearth in western living rooms, the garden in tropical Asian living rooms is the focal point of the room.

      Given the region's fast-forward thrust from agricultural society to tech-savvy industrialization in recent decades— which in turn has spawned an insatiable thirst for all things western—what is the new Asian living room about? Air conditioning has eliminated the need to have an open living room for cooling and ventilation purposes, while the new mode of living in compact, confined apartments in congested cities has made the aircon one of the basic necessity of urban living. Yet in Southeast Asia, there remains an attempt to adhere to some mode of communication with the outdoors.

      In modern city homes, this fascination with the outdoors not only harkens back to traditional living concepts, but has a larger function of creating a buffer between the home and the bustling concrete city outside. The congestion of metropolitan living has instilled in urbanites a heightened desire for space, light, and wherever possible, a resort-like atmosphere that pays tribute to the outdoors. Many of the luxury homes in Bali, Singapore, Malaysia and Thai land featured in this book incorporate the outdoor courtyard, swimming pools and other water features into the living room, with the use of sliding doors, glass walls, or no walls at all, so that the living room appears one with the garden. Even highrise apartments try to introduce some outdoor elements into the living area, though in Bangkok and Singapore, the cityscape replaces the garden-scape-for example, in the lavish penthouse suites at The Metropolitan Bangkok, where the living rooms are dominated by vast, two-storey windows that attempt to swallow the entire sky in one gulp.

      Within the walls (or lack of), a streamlined look is the desired look. Homeowners want interiors

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