The sprawling traditional Chinese courtyard home, known as the Siheyuan features several buildings built around a series of courtyards.
The main door of the Siheyuan is usually located in the lower south corner of the house, and opens to a forecourt that leads to another centrally located doorway that leads to the house proper. This stops passersby from being able to look into the main spaces of the house.
This property, known as the Austere Official's Home, has been restored and given a modern facelift, while still in keeping to its classical roots. Much of the home's layout is based on ancient beliefs of how energy moves in a space, while the overall home itself represents the Chinese obsession with walled spaces, with a Siheyuan often consisting of walls within walls of walled yards, gardens and liminal spaces, connected by a covered walkway.
Contemporary Chinese interior design is a fascinating design niche, that can draw on design principles and material use anywhere from the Qing to the Han Dynasty, and Chinese aesthetics can be anywhere from ostentatious and overwhelming to refined and restrained.
Many associate Chinese interior aesthetics with red lacquer, silk furnishings, whimsical carpentry and gilded surfaces in excess but more often than not, classical Chinese interiors are more likely to feature more sedate tones of dark grey, black and deep brown, with hardwood furnishings in clear lacquer, with grey brick walls. or white plaster walls, as well as stone floors and granite paved exterior spaces.
The Austere Official's Home's makeover is based on a popular movement in Chinese interior design that draws on more consistent and refined use of materials and colours, with a recognisably Chinese aesthetic, while incorporating more contemporary ideas on the usage of space. A style popular with hotels in particular, being fairly accessible to international palettes while still being "Chinese" in feel.
Many Siheyuans require a lot of retro fitting and renovation to match our modern use of interiors, however. For instance, classical Chinese homes did not have living rooms, or dining rooms, or in fact, rooms at all. Chinese architecture typically does not rely on load bearing walls to support the structure, and as such, do not have the division of space seen in Western builds. Chinese spaces are therefore riddled with supporting wooden columns, which are joined by dividing screens and folding doors that create the "rooms" of a building, with the whole carpentry being held down by a wonderfully heavy and graceful roof. This actually makes them fairly earthquake resistant structures.
Typically this means a building in the Siheyuan is all encompassing in its function. It features a bedchamber, a study and a reception hall. Things like dining and ablutions are restricted to furniture and wherever they are placed. How this translates into a modern restored interior is interesting. For this build, much like a shell challenge I kept the structural pillars intact, while moving around the divider walls to reconfigure the space, while buildings can now be repurposed to house the rooms modern inhabitants would need.
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