Room Tour: Our Ideal Open-Concept Living Space

Hi everyone, it’s Twilife.

Since building our home with Sumitomo Forestry in 2025, we’ve been slowly perfecting our ideal space.
Today, I’m thrilled to finally share something so many of you have requested: a room tour of our main living area (LDK)!

The Theme of Our Home Build

Our goal was to create a comfortable space filled with natural light and fresh breezes, much like a Southern European villa or a resort hotel.
Rather than a simple, boxy room, we wanted a playful living area where you can find multiple cozy spots to relax.
Because it’s where we spend every day, we obsessed over not just its visual beauty, but also its functionality and coziness.

Plastered Walls and Tiled Floors Unifying the Space

The defining feature of our main living area is that all the walls and ceilings are hand-painted plaster instead of standard wallpaper.
Furthermore, we used our favorite tiles continuously from the entryway, through the living area, and straight out into the courtyard.
By unifying the space with highly expressive natural materials that show the warmth of handcraftsmanship, we aimed for that authentic Southern European vibe.

We’ve put together detailed articles explaining our DIY plastered walls and the floor tiles we selected, so be sure to check those out!

The Balance of Large Windows and Lighting

Another major priority was incorporating multiple large windows, including massive sliding glass doors.
Large windows aren’t generally recommended if you’re strictly prioritizing insulation efficiency, but by making everything other than the main sliding doors fixed (non-opening) windows, we honestly haven’t felt cold at all so far.
Instead, the abundant sunlight flooding in makes us feel incredibly warm, both visually and physically.

We also minimized the use of recessed downlights as much as possible. During the day we rely on natural sunlight, and when it gets dark, the space is softly illuminated by cove lighting hidden in the tray ceilings, along with light spilling in from the courtyard.

Eliminating downlights allowed us to keep the ceiling completely clean and flat, creating an incredibly open, expansive space.
The gentle indirect lighting grazing the uneven texture of the plastered walls creates a wonderfully relaxing atmosphere at night.

We only installed downlights in the dropped ceiling over the kitchen, and in the dining room corner specifically to highlight our house plants.

The downlights in the kitchen are dimmable and color-adjustable, allowing us to change the vibe depending on the scene—switching to bright white when cooking, and a warmer tone when eating.

A Clutter-Free, Smart Home Design

Another thing we obsessed over was “eliminating visual noise.”
In our main living areas, there are practically no light switches or remotes on the walls.
By linking everything—from the lighting to the motorized roller blinds in the courtyard—to Alexa voice control, we achieved a smart home that is both highly functional and visually perfectly clean.
The setup for this got a bit complicated, so I’ll explain it in detail another time!

Room Tours by Area

We poured so much love into our living area that it’s impossible to cover it all in one post, so I’ve created detailed room tour articles for each specific zone.
I’ve poured all our design philosophies for each area into these posts, so please check them out starting with whichever space catches your eye!

Building Our Ideal Home

Our main living area is packed with our ideals and obsessions. I truly hope these area-specific articles serve as helpful inspiration for anyone about to start their home-building journey.

We also share our room tours and snippets of our daily life on our YouTube Vlog, so we hope you’ll enjoy checking that out as well.

Thank you so much for reading to the end.