After more than 10 years of interior designs for individual residences, hotels, restaurants, stores and office buildings, Jiang Tao finally designed her home when she settled with her husband and son in her favorite community in Beijing, Cathay View, near the capital airport. "Before moving here, I'd been living in the company's apartments. This is the only villa compound in Beijing that appeals to me. It is so Chinese and I love it," Jiang said, elegantly dressed in a long gray skirt, simply accessorized with a silver necklace.

You may wonder how an experienced interior designer, who has handled all sorts of styles for others, designs her own home.

"Simple and natural," Jiang said without hesitation.

Adding that the villa has a Zen-like atmosphere where time seems to creep past on tiptoes.

From the minute you walk in, you notice something is distinctly different here. It takes some time to discover that things have no borders. Doors and mirrors are easily mistaken for part of the walls because there are no frames and they reach to the ceiling.

Despite the height of the rooms, no suspended ceilings are used, so that the whole space flows fluently, even the handrails along the stairs are whole blocks of glass, the edges well polished.

Jiang said that the theme is "boundlessness".

"I love the feeling that things extend by themselves without ending," she added.

Jiang's husband is an architect and the two worked together to achieve the home they wanted.

"We share similar tastes and have made everything in this house from scratch," Jiang said, resting her hand on a guqin (a Chinese musical instrument) made by her husband.

Everything is so tidy, neat and chic in this house that the travails of life seem far removed.

The kitchen - where floor-to-ceiling storage shelves play hide and seek behind moveable sections of wall - reveals itself behind two giant mirror sliding doors.

Jiang said she got her inspiration for the dcor from the excavation of a house of the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24) and the villa harks back to a traditional Chinese courtyard house.

"I want to make history return in my house, but with modern technology. I think Chinese people should live in houses made of natural materials."

The couple used a special mixture of cement and sand as the wall coating in almost every room and you feel like touching the walls as you walk around. They also used naturally dried timber blocks of different sizes as flooring, which, when walked on, produce pleasant sounds. The table, bench and fish pond on the large second-floor balcony are made from cement, and there are natural stones with small holes in the handmade bathroom pools.

"Because it is our own home, we can try new materials I might not dare to use with my clients. I feel so happy that it has proved such a great success. This is just the effect I imagined," Jiang said.

For an experienced artist like Jiang, it takes only a limited number of materials and colors to make a beautiful, cozy home. Here Jiang has used a neutral palette: the light brown of specially processed cement, greenish glass, dark brown timber, and natural marble stones. You can sense the couple's tranquility and intelligence in the way the different materials complement each other, and it reminds you that life is an intellectual and spiritual journey.

The Oriental influence of the past is continued in the courtyard and the tearoom, which have a typical Japanese feel. The tearoom in the courtyard gives the impression of being in nature as big windows frame the bamboo and rockeries outside. From a distance, the blue glass at the back of the sofa looks like the sea stretching to the horizon. A tiny little loudspeaker hidden in a vase keeps playing a piece of heart-soothing guqin music that adds to the calm atmosphere.

The Japanese influence is also evident in the courtyard where a careful arrangement of two clove trees and three giant stones emerging from a shallow pond of white sand creates the impression of a snow-covered landscape.

Jiang's husband made the major change to the original small windows of the house that overlooked the courtyard and which both of them disliked. Now giant glass panels rise from the ground to the very top of the house.

Jiang, who majored in industrial design, contributed to the design of the lamps and water taps and the long narrow stainless steel tube that falls directly from the ceiling and points toward the pool.

"I tried to imitate how rain falls from the sky," she said.

Jiang also likes to give everyday items a practical function. The desk in her study uses hundreds of issues of art magazines.

"Just make sure they are piled in good order to the same height and then lay the heavy wood plate on them, and a personalized desk is done," she said.