Renovation

Designed by A. Mortimer McMillan, the 1930s Arts and Crafts style home ‘Devenescire’ has been rehabilitated with a comprehensive remodeling that has been carefully considered. The original heritage-listed home has been transformed by a masterful contemporary design approach that addresses the modern needs of a young family living while celebrating the private garden setting and abundance of natural light. The approach to the project was to celebrate the original heritage building by establishing a simple contemporary architectural dialogue between old and new. The design aims to simply be ‘perceived’ as a modern insertion into the heritage building, as opposed to establishing an appendage.  The line between old and new is blurred and seamless.

The territory of Cercedilla, a municipality located 57 kilometers from Madrid in the Sierra de Guadarrama, has been shaped by the three countryside-to-city migrations of the last decades. During the past decade, a new type of rural inhabitant has emerged, who is at the same time urban: a population that returns to the countryside without having left the city.

Traditional garden and scenery borrowing
Chaozhou Heritage City, Chun Garden next to Rao family’s residence and Youxiong Hotel are all characterized by their amazing layout of traditional Chinese garden. Adjacent to Chun Garden and embodying the essential artistic layout of Chinese garden, Chaozhou Youxiong Hotel is composed of a centralized guest house named Free House (a renovated 1980’s ramshackle building), 301 two-courtyard guest house (i.e. named Not arrogant and Not boring), 303 Tonghua Book House (Check-in, a Chaozhou-style building), two 278 courtyard guest house (named Refreshing and Open-minded), and a three-story house (used for restaurant, bar and tea house). With different ages, sizes and styles of architecture, all these five buildings along with the wall of Rao family’s residence and Chun Garden as well as other neighboring old buildings in the heritage city form a long narrow space.

The housing is located within the framework of a renovation in which there was only one floor on a 75m2 plot, in which the housing occupied 2/3 of the footprint. The layout of the house was directly related to a 9m tall tree (ficus) on its southwest facade. 

The project is developed from an articulated request from the clients: a new entrance, greater interaction with open spaces, and the renovation of the basement.

The project is to renovate the top floor of a house along the Second Ring Road in Chengdu, which is located in a residential area developed in 2004. Entering the new millennium, the real estate market has not yet taken shape, the routine of real estate development has not yet been finalized, and the standardized assembly line model has not yet solidified into a general law. Individual small and medium-sized developers even have idealistic plots, and their products present a rich posture rarely seen in the next 20 years. For example, the “Shanghe City” on the Funan River in Chengdu is one example. Developed in 2003, the multi-story residential complex has the ground floor elevated to leave public space. A small art gallery is also designed in the residential area. The community where this project is located is also a special product of this period.

Inside and Outside. The museum is located outside of the town, which automatically constitutes the first level of inside-outside relationship: the museum in the greenbelt is independent of the entire town. In order to clarify this independence, we placed the main interior space of the museum on the east side of the greenbelt, and the 60-meter distance from the east entrance of the town becomes a buffer zone between the town and the museum. This intentionally broadened boundary, like the natural succession of fields at the edge of Luzhi town, enables us to manage the spatial experience before entering the museum: For visitors coming from the town, this space will hint at the border of the town and the beginning of the greenbelt with the ambiance of the museum, so that people can serenely and naturally continue their art journey; for the museum, this space is a precursor of the visiting experience, an external temperament, and an outward expansion.