After giving up architecture, he turned a batch of Shanghai's idle homes into fashionable event spaces

MeetBest's basic model works like this: find idle spaces around the city, partner with the owners or rent the place outright, renovate it to suit what the property actually is, turn it into a shared social venue or a commercial event space, and rent it out by the hour to whoever needs it.

A few years ago, the architect He Yong bought a place on North Urumqi Road, near Jing'an Temple in Shanghai — an old duplex apartment with an open-air terrace on the top floor. From it he could see Lujiazui in the distance and the streetscape right below.

One day a friend said he wanted hairy crab. He Yong said, "Then come over to my place." That was the first time his unfinished apartment hosted guests. Afterward the crab-eating friend recommended the place to another friend, who wanted to throw a birthday party there — paying for it, of course. The birthday was two weeks off and the apartment was still close to empty, with none of the big furniture in place, so He Yong rushed to order a sofa, buy a fridge, a table and chairs, and set up a sound system, a projector and a screen.

That, He Yong says, is where the first customer of his company, MeetBest, came from.

He began listing the apartment for booking on Airbnb, and word of mouth on Moments gave it plenty of exposure too. Communities of every stripe gathered there: a crayfish-dissection lab party run by Party in a Box, a Harry Potter-themed farewell party, even a Wing Chun association that came to meet and trade techniques. Someone proposed marriage there.

"Users have far more imagination and creativity than we do," He Yong says. "All we supply is a container for behavior. They're the ones actually creating the future."

He Yong had worked at several well-known architecture firms — Atelier Deshaus, Urbanus, Aedas Hong Kong — and then went into an entirely different business. "It strings together almost everything I used to care about, everything I liked, researched and poked at. There was hardly a better choice."

The user scenario he had pictured took shape at that party: a social space a little like home but not quite, where everyone could do as they pleased — chat, play games, drink, eat dessert, play board games, watch films — each in their own way.

MeetBest's basic model works like this: find idle spaces around the city, partner with the owners or rent the place outright, renovate it to suit what the property actually is, turn it into a shared social venue or a commercial event space, and rent it out by the hour to whoever needs it.

Leases with owners usually run at least a year, with profit splits set in bands against revenue — anywhere from a bit over 20% to 60-70%.

Among the spaces currently listed on MeetBest, He Yong's own panoramic-terrace apartment near Jing'an Temple starts at 350 yuan an hour; the exhibition hall in Jing'an Park goes for 1,400 yuan an hour; the rest fall between 175 and 3,510 yuan an hour, rising when weekend and holiday bookings pick up.

By He Yong's account, that old apartment would fetch 20,000 to 25,000 yuan a month on a normal lease. Charging by the hour and running it as a social space, he took in more than 28,000 yuan in the first month, over 30,000 in the second, and 60,000 by the fourth. Another property near the Bund brought in more than 90,000 yuan in its second month open.

At an average of 400 yuan an hour, 60,000 yuan a month means renting the Jing'an Temple terrace apartment out for 150 hours; the deep house near the Bund needs 225 hours to reach 90,000 a month. If one event runs six or seven hours, both spaces have to be booked more than 20 days a month — and a celebrity photo shoot or a brand's ad shoot can tie up even more time.

He Yong says MeetBest's spaces are booked 30% to 60% of the time in an average month, and some customers book them overnight.

MeetBest began operating in March 2016. At first there were only He Yong, his partner Wang Junfeng and one employee; between them the three did everything, from finding the properties and renovating them to putting them online.

He Yong later brought in a second, technical co-founder, Xu Yin, back from Silicon Valley, as CTO, and the team slowly grew. He Yong sets strategy and controls the product. Wang Junfeng, an architect who graduated from Harvard and worked at SOM, doubles as COO, running business development and marketing. Xu Yin, previously at the travel social-networking company trip.com, sets and carries out the technology strategy. The team has gone from 3 people to 15, working across four departments: online, offline, marketing and operations.

The spaces at their disposal have grown too — from Mishi, He Yong's own place at the start, to old houses, apartments, villas and private gardens all over Shanghai.

Hunting for these idle spaces, He Yong found that most owners had no sensible answer of their own. Big houses asking more than 20,000 yuan a month were especially hard to let, and whether the lease was long or short, it always ate up time and effort, leaving the place either empty or badly used.

He Yong tried to talk these owners into working with him on the MeetBest model, and ran into plenty of doubt: would the returns really be that high, would the design and renovation be done in-house, could the operations keep up. But in those conversations he could point to spaces already running, and would even take owners to see them. "At this point the owners we sign hardly hesitate, because as far as they know, there's no better option on the market for this kind of space."

What gave He Yong the worst headaches was the neighbors. MeetBest was testing a new model, and while it tried to build trust next door, objections and worries came with the territory.

"We've even knelt in front of a neighbor. It was bitter," He Yong says. They once listed a sky-blue house filled with white ball-pit balls, full of childish charm and good for children's birthday parties, a place kids loved. After complaints about the noise, it had to be shut down.

The same thing happened at other properties in residential areas. Parties built on a party atmosphere are hard to keep quiet, especially at night.

So they installed decibel meters in the rooms, warning users that sustained volume must stay under 85 decibels between 9 a.m. and 10 p.m. From 10 p.m. to 9 a.m. the limit is 80 decibels with the windows shut, 70 with them open, and no heavy bass.

This is not only MeetBest's worry as the operator. Users have to think about it too, since even a raised voice can disturb the neighbors. There is an agreement between MeetBest and its users: go over the limit and draw a neighbor's complaint, and the fine is 500 yuan; if the noise brings the police, the fine starts at 3,000.

Relations with the neighbors are part of MeetBest's operating cost, and in He Yong's view one of the things it cannot control. It has become one of the team's key tests of whether a location is worth taking at all. "Some places, however good the property itself is, have too many forces we can't control, and we won't touch them." They now take on as few purely private residences as they can.

MeetBest has been operating formally for a year and a half, taking bookings through its WeChat official account and mini program.

Along with individuals and loose groups, it has picked up a lot of corporate and celebrity clients.

In MeetBest's spaces, Pizza Hut has run a delivery livestream and Yue-Sai has demonstrated product tutorials for viewers; Dyson, Coca-Cola and Panasonic have shot ads there, and web series have filmed on location across the various spaces. At Elsewhere, the space where the crab dinner started it all, Apple held a team-building event themed on Tiny Times; IKEA's Shanghai office held an annual party and a small gathering there; Starbucks, Lancôme and WeWork have all used it for team-building and training.

He Yong is startled by how fast the users have piled up, and by their quality. "Even people who have their own spaces — the Peninsula Hotel, WeWork, booking.com — pay to book this place."

Party in a Box is a studio that designs parties. This past summer it built a modern lab party, equal parts teaching and play, for a group of young corporate managers on a training program: brain-twisting games, plus a creative segment dissecting crayfish.

The space they rented was He Yong's original old apartment. They picked it for two reasons: the MUJI-style decor suited the mood of the party, and the space worked hard, with separate zones for photos, projection and food.

The Wing Chun association mentioned earlier had long wanted a private place it liked for its third-anniversary event. Its members read a short write-up of MeetBest in Harper's Bazaar, sent someone to look the site over, and booked the old house near Jing'an Temple. Everyone had a fine time: the roomy living room had a tatami platform, which became the small stage where practitioners sparred and compared techniques.

Because the product grew smoothly, He Yong was in no hurry to hire for marketing. Feng Fei, who heads marketing, only joined MeetBest in July last year.

"What we make is a fixed product, not just design services. There are several layers to this. First, if you only do design services, the client comes to you with defined requirements, and as a designer you have very little control. Second, these small projects usually don't involve much investment from the owner, so there isn't much profit in them — and in China a lot of people assume that for something purely service-based, your costs must be very low, that you have no material costs, only labor. They have no way to judge how much experience and time your expertise takes," He Yong says.

Back in 2013 He Yong had already put forward the idea of the "urban hacker," defining architects who improve the design of neglected city spaces as hackers inside the city. In a 2014 article, "Urban Hacker," published in Time+Architecture, he wrote about what architectural practice could be in the internet era.

In the end he did not become an architect.

"When you were an architect, the whole city was a more visible system, not something you understood through an invisible system like the internet. And when it's a visible system, what counts tends to be landmarks, things with so-called symbolic value. An architect lucky enough to build one such thing in his life — that's what makes him a great architect."

"With the internet, a lot of things changed. The city has always changed with technology, and it's becoming fragmented... urban life is coming apart... In that old system, the huge things were all in the hands of whoever had the most resources and the most power. But now I think every person has a sense of presence. Those scattered, individual things are where each person's life, each person's existence, has its meaning. We're not building a monument for anyone. We're creating, for each individual and each small group, a place they find worth something — and that place can be open or closed, big or small," He Yong says.

He also stresses keeping costs under control. Apart from his own apartment, MeetBest's arrangements with owners are flexible: the company comes in as designer and operator, positioning the space as a product at the start, then designing and executing it, then running and selling it. With word of mouth already working well, they have not spent on large-scale advertising or promotion.

"Doing this, I have to deal with all kinds of people — neighbors, landlords, neighbors again — and with the business registration bureau, property management, urban management officers, residents, the residents' committee, all of them. I have to deal with my users, and with my partners. That's how it usually goes. I don't think someone who only understands the internet could run this system well."

Next he wants to strip out as many uncontrollable factors as he can: build a standard system that makes the spaces easy to use and familiar enough to feel safe, then use non-standard details to create a different experience in each.

The standard kit includes HD projectors, surround sound, Texas Hold'em sets, UNO cards, knives, forks, chopsticks, spoons, bowls and plates, plus ovens, coffee machines and split-broth hot pots. Every space, because the building itself differs, delivers something different.

"The best experience is that the place I go is different every time, but the things inside feel like things I've met before, familiar," He Yong says.

Images courtesy of MeetBest.