He has renovated plenty of old hutong houses. The biggest headache is the neighbors | 100 People With Ideas

Whether he is renovating a hutong or giving a 300-year-old brand a new face, Han Wenqiang's designs almost always have something to do with traditional culture.

Han Wenqiang teaches at the School of Architecture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts — mostly interior design, and now and then architecture.

Arch Studio, which he founded in 2010, runs entirely on his own interest. The team, fewer than ten people at the moment, takes on only small, finely made projects, but every one of them is distinctive. In his words, "What a designer has to do is create difference. There is too much sameness in this world."

What recently pushed Arch Studio into public view is a hutong teahouse called Qu Lang Yuan, the Winding Corridor Courtyard. A Baidu search for the project returns about 4,000 results, and on WeChat's official accounts platform, 107 articles have written up the case.

This was not Han Wenqiang's first hutong renovation, but it was the first time he had tried to turn a hutong courtyard into a commercial space rather than a home.

The teahouse's owner is a friend of his who deals in calligraphy, painting and tea sets. He had leased this old courtyard house on Dongsi Shiyitiao and wanted to make it a teahouse that would double as a private club and an exhibition space, so he called in Han Wenqiang, who had renovated a hutong home for him before.

We wrote about the project in early June, when we discussed the idea behind it — "restore the old, insert the new," which came down to recovering the courtyard's original texture and adding a winding corridor, an element that changes the layout and the boundary between indoor and outdoor space.

Han Wenqiang told QDaily that this was never a standard siheyuan to begin with. The site covers 450 square meters, ringed by four traditional rooms, with a long, narrow courtyard in the middle.

Because the courtyard's layout was awkward, his first thought was to put a clear glass roof over the open middle section, so that the interior would be used to the full. It had been done before, at the Jing Zhao Yin restaurant at the mouth of Wudaoying hutong and at Triple-Major's experimental retail space Yao on Yangmeizhu Xiejie. But Han Wenqiang always felt that solution was a bit of a waste. After going back and forth he used the winding corridor instead: "I simply made the courtyard narrower."

As he sees it, a siheyuan stands for something ritualized. A traditional Chinese garden building is different: it serves no practical function, yet it opens up different views from different angles and feels good to be in. He wanted to think of the winding corridor as a garden. Next to the formality of a siheyuan, a garden stands for a kind of freedom.

The corridor also made the relationship between inside and outside subtle. Under the eaves of the existing rooms the designer inserted a flat winding corridor that ties the once-separate rooms together. Outside the rooms but inside the corridor, the bamboo Han Wenqiang picked out blurs the line between courtyard and house: it looks as though it were growing indoors, yet it reaches straight up to the open daylight above, so the space feels as if it runs through, inside connected to out.

As it happens, the siheyuan next door to the teahouse was also a Han Wenqiang project — "but it got out of hand toward the end, so I stopped taking part." The roughly 900-square-meter courtyard had housed 40 families. "It wasn't just the feel of a crowded compound. Everyone had one small room, and every open patch in the courtyard had a room built on it, even around the trees. It really was like the TV series The Happy Life of Talkative Zhang Damin, where a tree stands in the middle of the house."

Renovating that courtyard took Han Wenqiang three years, but the client ran into money trouble later on and, believing in the project only so far, never finished it to the original plan.

One wall away, and yet while he was working on the teahouse Han Wenqiang no longer wanted to bring up the project that had cost him three years. "I've cut off all contact with that side. I don't want to deal with them. I think design work is simply like this — disagreement is built into it, and it's hard for anyone to balance it well. The projects that turn out well are usually the ones where, on some shared ground, the client and the designer trust each other completely. Only then can the thing get done."

Han Wenqiang has done a good many hutong renovations. From the outside it can look like a special enthusiasm, but the reason he gives is plain: "Because I did the first one, and then the second, third and fourth came looking for me."

In fact, when he talks about hutong renovation there is more resignation in his voice than enthusiasm.

His first project was a light-well house in the traditional siheyuan district next to Dongsi Shiyitiao. What stood there were two low, run-down single-story houses put up in the late 1980s, 120 square meters in all, with no preservation value. The owner wanted to rebuild on the same site, with room for four bedrooms and a studio.

For the facade he chose the traditional gray brick most common in siheyuan, and varied the bonding pattern around the courtyard to produce a gradient of gaps, lightening the weight of the brick wall so that inside and outside could shift between solid and void and seep into each other.

To bring out how much the courtyard matters in a siheyuan, Han Wenqiang again softened the line between indoor and outdoor, giving the interior an alternating rhythm of courtyard and room and a spatial experience that keeps moving. The people still willing to live in a hutong these days, he told us, are mostly no longer locals. "They have some money and they long for siheyuan life. Rain, or the light shifting on a clear day — you feel it right away. It isn't like living in a tower block. A courtyard feels very comfortable." So even in a cramped space he held out for a conversation between the interior and the world outside.

The light-well house was the start of Han Wenqiang's hutong work. Having done a number of them by now, he is tired of it. "Unless the opportunity is really right, better to keep away from this kind of thing."

For one, no designer wants to repeat himself. The bigger reason is that the work eats time and nerves and pays little. "It's too much worry, too much effort. The floor area is small to start with, the schedule stretches out forever, and that isn't even the main thing. What matters is that the result gets pushed around by all sorts of factors — policy and regulation, for one; every kind of government department will have every kind of opinion while you build. And then there are the neighbors coming to make trouble. It wears you out."

In hutong projects, relations with the neighbors are a category of their own. "With neighbors, a lot of things can't be settled by one piece of reasoning," Han Wenqiang says. "You live too close together, and the human factor makes it thornier."

In the Xinsi Hutong house renovation, for instance, privacy between neighbors in the hutong had left the old house with very small windows and a closed, dim interior. So he cut away part of the original floor slab and added a clear glass skylight; through it, daylight in all its variation reaches straight down to the basement and becomes the bright visual center of the house.

It was exactly that small added glass roof that upset the neighbors, who said it was blocking light to their own houses. The two sides wrestled over it for a long time, and permission came only after the neighbors were paid.

Things like this come up almost daily in his design and building work. Take the 900-square-meter compound above: he not only had to go around greeting all the neighbors before construction started, paying them off was routine as well. "They come and make trouble and ask for money. Some of them really are bothered by the noise. Some just feel it isn't fair — their own place is shabby and small, they see you fixing up a much bigger house, and they'll come and smash the glass."

Digging too close to a neighbor's wall footing, or ending up slightly taller than the house next door, could set off a sizable "war" at any moment. "The wall behind you is somebody else's house. In a siheyuan like this people are extremely close together. The distance between people is forced shorter, not chosen. In one sense that's a good thing, it can produce a kind of neighborliness. But it also produces plenty of disputes, plenty of very bad situations."

Having seen enough of it, Han Wenqiang prefers to read it as a social question. "It's complicated. Most of the people living in this area are poor, and a large share of them come from outside Beijing — cleaners, water deliverymen, couriers and so on."

Next to thorny neighbors, dealing with government policy is much simpler and more direct.

There are generally two cases. To put up a new building you have to file it with the authorities, and once filing is involved nothing new can be built: the rules let you tear the house down, but it has to go back up exactly as it was, with no room for anything invented. The other case is renovation, which skips approval altogether — behind a closed gate the owner can rebuild the interior however he likes, but if the property is later sold or leased, it has to be torn out and returned to its original state.

"You've done so many hutong projects. What's your view on preserving hutongs versus renovating them?"

"A building is really just a shell. We can't talk about preservation as one single thing. Sometimes when people say preservation, there is a real need for it; sometimes what's needed is renewal, because people need that. The point of design is to help people live better, not to preserve a particular stretch of history for its own sake."

In Beijing, Arch Studio's projects cluster around the old city center. Besides hutongs, Han Wenqiang has done the Rongbaozhai Western Painting Gallery and the Rongbaozhai coffee bookshop — all of them connected, one way or another, to traditional culture.

Most of the contemporary art halls in Beijing's 798 art district are, in his view, spaces that need no deliberate design. Traditional galleries for calligraphy and painting are another matter.

This July, Arch Studio finished the Rongbaozhai Western Painting Gallery on Liulichang West Street, Beijing's best-known old street for antiques, calligraphy and painting. The building is a two-story reinforced-concrete pseudo-classical structure put up by the government in a uniform style in the 1980s, with one basement floor.

(The facade before and after the renovation)

Han Wenqiang finds traditional calligraphy-and-painting halls too symbol-laden. "They always feel odd and stiff, like things piled on top of one another."

When he took on the Rongbaozhai job, the screen exhibition wall became the core of the design. The folding screen is a signature element of traditional Chinese culture, but Han Wenqiang expressed it as stacked screens in a contemporary spatial language. On the ground floor, fixed screens enclose a box-like gallery open from top to bottom, which makes a sharp first impression; on the second floor, folding screen walls let the space be used flexibly and raise how much of it earns its keep. In the basement, a stretch-membrane ceiling creates a bright space like a courtyard, taking away the closed-in feeling that underground rooms usually give.

From the Winding Corridor Courtyard to the Western Painting Gallery, flow and openness both matter enormously in Han Wenqiang's designs: the first says it with a corridor, the second with a screen.

Another Rongbaozhai project finished in July, the coffee bookshop, is also his. The 300-year-old brand had run into the hard times of the bookselling trade, and the owner wanted to change the format: upgrade the shop, which sold Chinese calligraphy and painting publications and antique books, and try mixing it with a café, using a combined business model and a more varied experience to draw more readers in.

To cut the heavy, oppressive presence that large stretches of bookshelf can have on customers, Han Wenqiang chose shelves welded from solid iron bars one centimeter square, and let books and plants run in among them, so that readers feel something of nature while the greenery helps regulate the indoor microclimate. LED strips at the bottom of the planters give indirect light for reading. The plants are mostly shade-loving ferns; climbing shrubs sit in the higher planters, and small herbs such as mint and Vicks plant stand by the windows and on the coffee tables.

The heavy old bookstore became an open, light coffee bookshop. "What design finally does is make an environment people like to be in," Han Wenqiang told us. "When enough people like it, its usefulness goes up, and it's enough that it can quietly shape how people behave." In this space coffee, books, plants and people share the room; the design elements fade naturally into the background, and the place becomes one that draws out what people experience and feel.

Look closely at each Arch Studio project and common threads show up: indoor and outdoor space made one, boundaries deliberately blurred, a taste for working on the relationship between old and new. All of it, in Han Wenqiang's view, "is handling a kind of connection. There's no clean division — that's what makes design interesting."

He does not want to lift the profession to the level of philosophy or art. In the end, "it's about how you deal with a wall. Very concrete."

Images courtesy of

Arch Studio