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Sergio Mannino Studio
Architectural Branding
Architectural Branding
Luxury starts with a choice. It's the moment someone decides that life should offer more than the purely functional—that objects can be beautiful, that spaces can mean something more than their utility. In interior design, this translates into homes that aren't just containers for living, but carefully crafted environments with their own character and point of view.The Green Residence is a high-end residential interior design project we developed for a young couple in Shenzhen, China. The apartment sits inside a premium residential building, in a market where opulence doesn't whisper, it speaks. Here, high-end design tends toward boldness: rich decoration, complex layering, rooms that demand your attention.The thing is, richness without discipline just creates visual chaos. The real work—the part that matters—is designing spaces that can be both intense and controlled, expressive without falling apart. That's what drove this project: the idea that luxury is controlled intensity, not accidental excess.
We designed The Green Residence to feel unmistakably high-end, but not in the obvious ways. This isn't "hotel luxury"—those beige lobbies with generic stone and safe lighting. Instead, we treated the apartment as something closer to a designed object, a space where the owners' identity comes through in the color choices, the decorative logic, and the way materials interact.
What you get is a home that feels purposeful and personal. Decoration isn't something we tacked on at the end—it's built into the bones of the design.
Many luxury interiors play it safe because restraint has become the default. We took a different approach with The Green Residence: luxury can absolutely be saturated, even theatrical, as long as there's a thought behind it.
This project embraces color and density, but everything has a reason and a place. The key is knowing where to push and where to pause. Every bold statement gets balanced by a softer note. Every vivid surface plays against structure. Nothing's there just because it looked good in isolation.
Here's how I think about it: luxury is a unique design that tells a story.
Just filling a space with beautiful things doesn't make it luxurious. Decoration becomes luxury when it's working on a deeper level—when proportion, rhythm, and cultural reference are all in play.
In The Green Residence, decoration operates as a language. It tells you something about the people who live here, about their confidence, about their version of what contemporary luxury means. They're not apologizing for wanting richness or intensity.
This is where many projects fall short: they accumulate nice objects without building a coherent world. In a luxury residence, decoration needs to work like architecture. It organizes what you look at first, second, and third. It communicates identity. You can tell someone made deliberate choices.
Luxury isn't the opposite of poverty—it's the opposite of vulgarity.
And vulgarity isn't about using color or decoration. It's about losing control.
To keep intensity from tipping into chaos, we relied on design fundamentals that sound simple but are actually hard to execute consistently:
Clear visual axes that lead your eye through the space
Consistent proportional relationships between elements
Intentional repetition of lines and geometric forms
Careful alignment between surfaces and planes
Strategic contrast, not random contrast
An intentional rhythm between dense moments and breathing room
That's what makes the apartment feel luxurious when you're actually in it; it’s not the individual pieces, but the structural idea holding everything together.
In luxury home interior design, materials create mood, add tactility, change the temperature of a room, affect how light behaves.
We used layered surfaces throughout The Green Residence to build depth. The space reads differently depending on where you're standing: bold and dramatic from across the room, subtle and sophisticated when you get close. That's one of the most reliable markers of premium design—the details don't vanish when you walk up to them.
High-end interiors rely on the quality of materials and how they are put together.
When you're working with a visually rich interior, lighting becomes critical. Too much light flattens everything out. Too little light turns all that decoration into murky confusion.
We treated lighting in The Green Residence as a compositional tool. It creates hierarchy, builds atmosphere, and helps you understand what to focus on. It also has to work for two completely different conditions: daytime living and evening mood. Same space, different emotional register.
People remember luxury as a feeling. Lighting is what holds that feeling in place.
Luxury shows up in the accumulation of specific choices that add up to one integrated experience.
For this project, the high-end quality comes from:
Projects like The Green Residence need more than good taste—they need someone who can orchestrate complexity without losing the thread.
This is where luxury interior services become essential. High-end residential design usually includes:
Luxury today is about creating a unique character. It's designing a home as a complete world, one where materials, decoration, and atmosphere communicate a particular aspect of culture and taste, instead of generic aspirations or ephemeral trends.
Absolutely. Color becomes a mark of class when it's carried out meticulously. Luxury requires coherence, intention, and expert composition.
Precision. How materials meet each other, how elements match up, the way lighting creates hierarchy, the quality of surfaces—people register all of this immediately, even if they can't articulate exactly why something feels premium.
By designing a hierarchy. Not every element is competing for attention. Some moments are designed to dominate; others are designed to support. Getting that balance right is what separates richness from clutter.
They're comprehensive design services: concept development, planning, materials, lighting, custom details, and coordination to make sure the final space is consistent and intentional in every detail.
The Green Residence reflects an important aspect of contemporary luxury residential interior design: luxury is about freedom, the freedom to choose richness, expression, and beauty as meaningful parts of everyday life. Luxury creates heightened meaning. When decoration carries cultural weight, when color expresses identity, and when intensity is balanced by discipline, a home stops being generic.
It becomes something authored.
Project developed in collaboration with Area 17 Beijing
