Days of Being

Days of Being is a residential renovation in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, by Studio Paul Chan, completed in 2024. The project reworks a 1920s Craftsman house into a cinematic holiday home shaped by memory, ritual, and Chan’s own cultural and spatial references—from Hong Kong’s dense street life to New York’s emotional textures—recast as a quieter domestic retreat in Los Angeles.

Spatial experience is paced like film rather than open-plan spectacle. Chan describes moving through the house the way one moves through memory: nostalgic, cinematic, and arranged for pause. References to Wong Kar Wai’s saturated cinema—including the small repeated gestures of In the Mood for Love—inform how rooms and objects accumulate familiarity over time. The Craftsman’s weathered joists and exposed beams remain visible, so the renovation does not erase the bungalow’s imperfections; instead it keeps time readable in the structure while new interventions settle beside older fabric.

Material choices deepen that register. Hand-finished plaster walls, dark-stained wood, and vintage stone surfaces build a patina of use, recalling textured Hong Kong tea-house interiors and quieter European ateliers. In the kitchen, glossy green zellige tiles meet a jade green pendant lamp reminiscent of 1930s Shanghai, pairing irregular handmade tile with more geometric lighting restraint. Vintage pieces such as a Keyaki wood tea chest and a Mario Bellini sofa sit with custom work in a high-low mix the studio likens to Art Deco grace set against humble street intimacy.

Collaborators include Jeremy Kim, Krystal Chang, and ROAM Builders; photography by Yerin Mok, Ai Kojima, and Emanuel Hahn. Days of Being reads as Silver Lake residential interior design that keeps Craftsman character while staging a contemporary, film-literate domestic atmosphere.