the bridge house

Shanghai, China. 2020

At present, urban living and the future of big cities the world over are being challenged, but the concept of community is more potent than ever. Since COVID-19’s world tour, we’ve been forced to reexamine our relationship to our homes, public space, and communities. With Cohost, AIM’s second project, The Bridge House which invest by Trust Bridge located in the heart of Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, we’re redefining co-living for a new world.

Now, room size or square footage is second to the personality of a space. Distinctive places with personal touches and deep cultural context are the norms.

At AIM, a foundational piece of our ethos is building for a better community. We believe that good design cultivates strong connections. Rather than thinking of shared living space or coliving as a necessity, we interpreted it as an opportunity. With The Bridge House by Cohost, sharing space isn’t just a practical choice, it’s a bold one, where inhabitants can share values and ideas – and a kitchen.

Isn’t the best possible connection of apartments the very base of architecture? 

Yet, in its conventional sense ‘Apartments’ tend to be more stand-alone than live together. This project hopes to disagree. 

We designed a succession of interconnected rooms that open up to one another, like a conversation between spaces, the personalities that inhabit them, and their individual purposes. Standing in the green host lounge, you can gaze into the red game room and see the yellow library just beyond it. These monochromatic spaces talk refinement and originality，celebrate their purposes with strong patterns and bold furniture.

The experience of the space expands through striped wooden doors that can compartmentalize charming communal areas, with details that wink at Shanghai’s Art Deco history. Polished cement walls and floors provide unity and maturity.

For some, shared space might conjur up a cookie-cutter dorm and cramped quarters. The Bridge House By Cohost, with its generous 4.3 m high ceilings, premium apartments, and abundance of light and space, invites you to reconsider. Each apartment has a beautiful internal void at the window to capture natural light and maximize space.

Most importantly, The Bridge House By Cohohost is built to last and built to live in. Designed for all the messy, vibrant, peaceful, shared, and private moments that make up a life, we chose elements that are rooted in the reality of its future inhabitants. Here, communal living reaches beyond simply sharing space to realize a powerful, built-in sense of interconnectedness.

Client: Trustbridge Partners
Operation：Cohost
Location: Shanghai, China
GFA: 13410 sqm
Completion: 2020
Design Scope: Interior & FFEServiced Apartments, 157 keys and all public spaces, including lobby, lounge, shared kitchen, dinning area, public toilet, shared laundry
Design Principals: Wendy Saunders, Vincent de GraafProject Manager: Cindy Xu
Project Architect: Byungmin JeonInterior Team : Carter Chen, Lily Zhu, Maggie Li, Ningyuan Cai, Jiao Yan
FFE Team: Michael Hankiewicz, Peichin Lee, Renee Hu, Sowon Lee
Photography: Dirk Weiblen，Cohost