What if a home started not with rooms, but with a garden? That’s exactly what happened in Ningbo, China, where a designer couple threw out the original floor plan of their top-floor apartment and rebuilt everything around a single idea: a three-metre-square open-air courtyard at the heart of their home.

The Inner Garden, designed by OUTIN Design and their SìBān Studio team, is a 430 square metre residence that puts nature front and centre. Two Japanese maples stand beneath open sky, their roots surrounded by ferns and wild stones.

It’s a small slice of countryside suspended above the city—and every room in the house connects back to it.

“All considerations started from the garden and the views,” explains the owner. “To have a garden, and then wrap life around it.” That vision drove a complete transformation. The original five-bedroom layout was scrapped, replaced by two slender spiral staircases that thread through the home, linking the open-plan ground floor to private quarters above.

Downstairs, the living, dining and kitchen areas flow together in one bright, connected space. South-facing windows flood the rooms with natural light—most days, there’s no need for artificial lighting at all. A narrow entry corridor designed by the husband draws visitors toward the brightness, pausing at a small vestibule filled with collected objects, plants and artwork. It’s a moment to breathe before the main space opens up.

Upstairs, every room shares views of the central garden. Dark reddish marble frames the doorways, turning each threshold into a picture frame that composes the greenery beyond. The husband grew up in rural Zhejiang, where traditional houses had small square windows that captured the landscape outside. That memory runs quietly through the design here—Eastern techniques of framing views, applied without heavy-handed symbolism.

The furnishings mix contemporary pieces with personal treasures: a white Vitsoe shelving system, plump EDRA sofas, and a striking cyan Cassina sideboard by Kazuhide Takahama. Scattered among them are a clay Qilin figurine from a Quanzhou artisan, a tea bowl found in Japan, bamboo baskets passed down from the wife’s family—objects that provide anchors to memory and meaning.

“The biggest change since moving in is that I actually have weekends now,” the owner says. The space has shaped how they live, slowing things down, drawing them back to the garden at the centre of it all.

[Images courtesy of OUTIN Design. Photography by ZHU Di.]