Matali Crasset: In Living Color

Matali Crasset In Living Color
With its technicolor walls and ersatz trees, the Beijing apartment that Matali Crasset designed last fall would seem to qualify as a bona fide house of the future.

It is, after all, part of an experimental project that called for 10 international designers to dream up as many residences in conjunction with the Chinese capital's First Architectural Biennial 2004.

Crasset didn't try to predict any new modes of living, however. Instead, she gave vibrant form to the possibilities of the present.

Joining other contributions by the likes of designer Denis Santachiara and architect Bernard Tschumi, all of which are for sale, Crasset's apartment is on the seventh floor of a 31-story tower in Phoenix City, an upscale commercial and residential complex.

As a counterpoint to the hubbub outside, the designer covered the floors of the 2,700-square-foot residence in calming white resin.

She organized it around a central, rectangular core that's wrapped in translucent acid-green glass and edged by a row of artificial trees constructed from birch rods.

Blue ceilings evoke the sky. "It's like finding a refuge in nature," says Crasset, principal of her eponymous Paris-based industrial-design firm.

Of course, the cartoonlike trees and electric colors hardly look natural.

Crasset, a Philippe Starck prot�g� whose previous w