Friendship Apartment by Onoaa Studio Turns a 1941 Shanghai Apartment Into a Home Built on Trust.

Most briefs arrive as a document. This one was pieced together over years of shared meals, gatherings and working afternoons. When a creative couple decided to make their home in Shanghai’s Friendship Apartment, they turned to Onoaa Studio, the practice Gao Ya and Chen Peng founded in the city in 2019. The designers are also their long-time friends.

Which makes the building’s original Chinese name all the more charming. Liangyou translates as “good friends”. The studio is careful to say that meaning wasn’t imposed on the project, and fair enough. It’s still a lovely coincidence, with the name now pointing as much to the trust between client and designer as to the address.

That address sits on the corner of Fuxing West Road and Yongfu Road. Built in 1941 as a four-storey brick-and-concrete block, the building gained two more storeys in 1991 and has been lived in continuously ever since. The owners were drawn less by the apartment itself than by what surrounds it: street trees, shops, neighbours and homes packed closely together, still very much in use. That everyday density became the starting point for the design.

Onoaa Studio sees a home as a set of relationships between an existing building, the people in it and their changing habits, so it’s never really finished at handover. Instead of giving the apartment a new identity or playing up its history as a theme, the team recomposed it. They weighed up what should stay, which old relationships no longer made sense, and which parts of daily life had been kept apart for too long.

The original brick-and-concrete structure, primary beams and columns were all retained. They aren’t boxed in, and they aren’t lit up as heritage props either. They stay put, with their own scale and weight, and the new plan works around them. The studio calls preservation a working method rather than a gesture, and we couldn’t agree more. Plenty of heritage renovations scrub a building clean or turn its past into decoration. This one does neither, and it’s all the better for it.

Here’s where the friendship does real work. The designers didn’t need a questionnaire to understand how this couple lives, because they’d been at the table for years. The brief came from watching: how close people sit in conversation, how they move between company and time alone, and how blurry the line between work and home gets for two people in the creative fields.

So there are no rigid, closed-off rooms. The interior operates as an open system where different domestic situations can happen, overlap and swap over through the day, and the owners keep adjusting it as they go. None of this relies on complicated form. Materials are paired to set up clear contrasts (heavy against light, rough against precise, revealed against concealed) without being forced into one unified look.

Friendship Apartments is far less about the past than its 1941 structure suggests. It makes a convincing case that a home takes its real shape from the relationships that keep unfolding inside it. Good friends, indeed.

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[Images courtesy of Onoaa Studio. Photography by Jonathan Leijonhufvud.]