CECE KOU
SPATIAL DESIGN PORTFOLIO
healing — roots — the senses
Design Statement
I design spaces that heal — grounded in cultural roots, and felt through all five senses.
- Three years of interior design study, one continuous thread: from object making to spatial experience.
- Space is a quiet therapist — a woven chair that holds a conversation, an atrium that untangles anxiety, a forest trail that listens.
- Space is also a vivid storyteller — incense smoke becomes a retail plan; an 800-year mushroom village becomes a five-sense sanctuary.
- Every project begins with a feeling people carry — social anxiety, cultural loss, sensory numbness — and ends with a walkable answer.
Four Threads
A practice that moves between object, space and landscape.
Projects
From a woven chair to a mountain village — four built narratives that test how space can heal.
Process
Research, material experiments and prototypes — the honest, messy middle of every design.
Research
Psychology, heritage and soundscape science — the evidence behind every feeling we design for.
Voice
Journal writing, case studies and films that carry the studio conversation outward.
Selected Works · 2024 – 2026
Four journeys from object to landscape.
- P.01 WOW — woven furniture for social anxiety, on campus.
- P.02 Songmont — incense smoke translated into a retail flagship.
- P.03 Jie Guang — a four-storey atrium that untangles the spotlight effect.
- P.04 Hollow Village — an 800-year mushroom village reborn as a five-sense sanctuary.
P.01
Furniture · Wellness
WOW — Alternative Furniture
Morita therapy meets the empty-chair technique in a pair of woven chairs for the busy teaching atrium.
P.02
Retail · Spatial Experience
Subliminal Retail Installation
The rhythm of incense smoke becomes architecture for Songmont's Oriental light-luxury flagship.
P.03
Installation · Psychology
The Installation Journey — Jie Guang
A narrative atrium that deconstructs the negative spotlight effect, floor by floor, into self-acceptance.
P.04
Heritage · Adaptive Reuse
Old Building Reuse — Hollow Village
An 800-year mushroom-culture village regenerated through mycelial logic and five-sense healing zones.
Research & Writing
From studio to story.
- My journal traces the inner workings of each design; my writing carries the research into a wider conversation.
- Experience-driven, human-centred architecture — the theme that runs from my first critique to my last case study.
Design Journal
- Material experiments, site studies and concept sketches.
- Documents how each healing narrative took form.
Gateway to the West Coast
- How Gensler's Terminal 1 turns infrastructure into a human-centred front door.
- An analysis of experience-driven aviation design at scale.
Design Projects
Furniture, retail, installation and adaptive village reuse — a practice ranging from object to landscape.
Years of Mushroom Culture
The intangible heritage of Longyan Village's "chopping flower" cultivation sustains the Hollow Village concept.
Senses Engaged
Sound, sight, touch, smell and taste are woven through my spatial narratives as instruments of healing.
