How I Spent a Night in an Old Shanghai Villa on Airbnb for Under 500 Yuan

The house looked lovely, but the experience was a little alarming.

At dusk, I followed the house number the host had posted on Airbnb to an old villa in the heart of the former French Concession. A middle-aged woman sent to bring us the keys was already waiting by the roadside, and she led us into the lane next door. It is a famous street, yet there were surprisingly few people on it. The light was fading, and we discovered the address had been written wrong on purpose. The whole thing began to feel like a clandestine rendezvous.

The villa had never been renovated. I pushed open a heavy iron gate and stepped into pitch darkness. The wooden stairs creaked underfoot, and halfway between the second and third floors a white wooden door suddenly appeared. I unlocked it and kept climbing. The third floor was the top one. Two closed doors stood at right angles to each other, and behind one of them was where I would sleep that night. A rug lay in front of the door, a bunch of forget-me-nots hung on the wall, and the round pendant lamp overhead was plainly new. In short, it was a different world from the one outside the white door.

My room was called "Vinyl," after the record player inside. Beyond that, the room was decorated with real flair; someone had clearly thought about it. A swing chair and an air mattress were charming (though the mattress had a slow leak), and a sofa, a rug, a stack of chairs and strings of LED lights were arranged around them. Because it sat on the top floor, it was really an attic, with a pyramid-shaped ceiling whose sloping edges were trimmed with black wooden strips, like a playful tent. Space was tight, so the bathroom had none of the overhead showers city dwellers take for granted, only an old-style bathtub with a hand sprayer. I never worked out how someone 1.7 meters tall was supposed to wash in it, but that hardly mattered. All told, a night in a converted old villa in the middle of the French Concession for under 500 yuan didn't sound outrageous.

The attic's sloping roof

The swing chair and the air mattress

The record player

Of course, I actually paid more than that, and the host, Xixi, actually received less. Airbnb takes a 10% commission from hosts and charges guests a small service fee; together these make up the short-term rental platform's main source of revenue. Founded in San Francisco in 2008, Airbnb grew explosively in 2011 and 2012, by 700% and 800% respectively. By the end of 2014 it had more than 1 million rooms worldwide. How big is 1 million? The world's largest hotel groups, InterContinental, Hilton and Marriott, each offer fewer than 700,000 rooms, and it took them far longer than six years to get there.

Many websites did something similar before Airbnb. Couchsurfing, for example, was popular with backpackers years ago: users could list the sofa in their living room and let travelers sleep on it for a few nights. With a small change, they could have rented out bedrooms or whole homes instead, and might well have become another Airbnb. But the style, positioning and business vision (or ambition, if you prefer) each company set at the start sent the two down increasingly opposite paths.

What kind of person lists a home on Airbnb? Before this trip I assumed it was middle-class people with a spare property, renting an empty flat or room to strangers. Then I noticed that many of the homes were decorated in an absurdly rustic way and, in Shanghai at least, looked nothing like the usual middle-class home. The rosewood furniture, curio shelves and screens that signal a family's wealth and taste are rare on Airbnb. Wall tapestries, hanging cabinets, tatami mats, low tea tables and other staples of Japanese or bohemian style are everywhere. Put simply, this is a deliberate style of decoration, and it comes from a new group of people. They may not own the houses, but in a sense they give the old buildings new life.

My host (she asked me to call her "Xixi") has 7 listings on Airbnb, every one an old villa that she and her partner designed and renovated themselves. Each unit has its own style and its own emphasis. Xixi trained in fashion design, and she handles this with ease. I felt it staying in one unit and visiting two others, and the hundreds of guest reviews on Airbnb say the same. In one two-story villa I found an old-fashioned radio, a model terracotta warrior and a portrait of Chairman Mao, which, for a tourist, richly satisfies a certain appetite for the exotic.

Xixi showed me the booking records in the app on her phone. I had checked in in early March, and as of that afternoon her 7 units were already booked for more than 24 days of March on average. In other words, had I been any slower, I might have had to wait until April.

How did the business begin? When I asked, Xixi's first response was: "I never thought of it as a business." At the end of last year she rented her first old villa, spent more than a month renovating it, and filled it with the antiques, oil paintings and record players she had picked up while living in London. One idle day, she listed the home she was living in on Airbnb, and to her surprise someone booked it almost at once. Caught off guard, she spent that night at her parents' place and handed the house over to a young couple who had come to Shanghai to sit a foreign-language exam.

In another unit, Xixi placed an old-fashioned radio and many small knickknacks familiar to the older generation

Xixi lived abroad for many years and was once an Airbnb guest herself, traveling across Europe and Asia. Her most memorable stay, she said, was a pricey villa on Jeju Island that the owner had designed and built entirely by hand. In London, a hundred-year-old house was also being rented out on Airbnb, and every object in it, from the sofa to the spoons, had a story behind it. That was when she decided that one day she would list a home on Airbnb too.

Searching the site, I found more than a thousand separate listings in Shanghai, most of them in the city proper. Each listing's photos show the host's avatar in the bottom right corner, so if you pay a little attention and flip through a few pages, you notice that quite a few listings belong to the same person. Click through to their profiles and you find more in common: young, with time spent abroad, working in a creative field, fond of making friends... People like this may not be a majority of the population, but on Airbnb they are the undisputed leading players.

Seven old villas is no small number. Where did they come from? Xixi told me each rents for around 10,000 yuan a month, and renovation costs anywhere from over 100,000 to 200,000 yuan, "so even though a lot of people have stayed, I still haven't made any money." Why keep going, then? Her answer was idealistic: "Because it's fun, and it's meaningful. I love design, and I like bringing a sense of culture to other people."

Xixi remembers the day her first guests checked in. "I was a bit nervous at first," she said. "I even helped carry their luggage. Looking back, that was pretty silly." But the guests kept coming and Xixi grew more practiced, and when she became too busy to do it all herself, she hired three women to clean the rooms and hand over the keys.

"Abroad, a lot of hosts hide the key somewhere, in a combination lockbox on the door, say, or under the doormat. Have you thought about something like that?" I asked. Xixi shook her head. "I still insist on having the women hand them over in person."

Xixi designed a set of travel guide cards herself and put them in the living rooms of all seven units

Chinese people have their own subtleties when it comes to sharing and exchange, so most companies and websites that come to China need a sizable localization effort. Airbnb seems to be an exception. Xixi told us that Airbnb does not specially inspect the houses ("I find that pretty strange too," she added). It only offers free photography and takes a small deposit at the start. Beyond that, her only contact with Airbnb staff came when a room payment failed to go through; she phoned the company and got quick, patient help.

And the guests? Xixi hesitated. "It's quite interesting, especially with the first unit. The people who came to stay were all pretty much my type." "What type?" "Say, they studied art or design, have lived abroad, like to daydream... and really love life." Although she rarely meets her guests, these sweet strangers sometimes surprise her. One guest left a bunch of flowers in the house for her, along with a note thanking her for a wonderful stay.

"Of course, there are some less likable ones too," Xixi said, with a blink. Once a boudoir photographer brought a large crew to shoot in the house, and they made so much noise that the neighbors called the police. After that, Xixi and her partner rewrote much of their house rules on Airbnb, requiring a separate location fee for photo shoots and setting clear limits on hours and head counts.

To her this was only reasonable: as the designer, charging a fee is a tacit way of asserting her copyright. But some guests wouldn't accept it. One man who wanted to shoot a short film in the house, on hearing there would be a location fee, snapped, "Filming in your place is doing you a favor," and stormed off. Another man ignored the rules, shooting a marriage-proposal video in the middle of the night and retaking a shot of a door closing again and again until the neighbors warned him.

Apart from these rare unpleasant episodes, Xixi finds most guests decent and friendly. The seven units hold plenty of valuable things, yet in more than three months nothing has gone missing, and many guests tidy the room before they leave without being asked. What makes them all keep to such rules without being told? Xixi's answer: "I think people who choose Airbnb have things in common; maybe they identify with a certain culture. Through the houses I design, they feel a love of life too, and they instinctively look after it."

The background of Airbnb's homepage is not a still image. The San Francisco company knows a great deal about selling a way of life, and it uses looping video to convey the appeal of "living" and "home." If you had to sum up its work in one sentence, it would be the line floating over the footage: "Rent unique places to stay from local hosts in over 190 countries." That dream seems to be working out well here: its listings have spread from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to many second- and third-tier cities. Few people realize that Airbnb does not yet have a single office on the Chinese mainland. Its Asia headquarters is in Singapore, and its nearest branch to us is in Hong Kong.

The Chinese-language homepage of Airbnb

See the words "Welcome home"? This dream, once dismissed as utopian, spread unhindered to more than 30,000 cities around the world, until it reached New York. In 2010 the state legislature in Albany passed a law banning owners of apartments in multiple dwellings (multi-unit residential buildings, as opposed to detached houses) from renting them out for fewer than 30 days. Any exceptions? Yes: when the host lives there too.

Although many users rent a single bedroom or a living room on Airbnb, when the price is fair most prefer a spacious, private entire home (Entire House). Airbnb has clashed with the city government over this again and again, and has spent heavily on advertising, public relations and legal teams to fight it. At the bottom of the Airbnb site there is even a dedicated link to "Support NYC", where users can post messages backing Airbnb in New York.

And what about China, which regulates short-term rentals and temporary stays just as strictly? We have not seen any news reports aimed directly at Airbnb rentals in China, but here is a curious episode worth sharing.

While I was enjoying having the attic all to myself, a knock at the door gave me a real fright. I stayed silent for a while, but the knocking didn't stop, and a voice kept asking through the door in Shanghainese, "Anyone in? Open the door, please?" They sounded middle-aged, a man and a woman. I had no choice but to open up and let in two uninvited guests.

They introduced themselves as an official from the neighborhood committee and an officer from the local police station, and asked to see my ID and the lease for the flat. I protested that I was "just staying a night at a friend's place," but they still asked for my ID and phone number, politely but firmly. The neighborhood committee official then wrote my details in a notebook, and the police officer photographed both sides of my ID with a phone.

It was the first time police had ever come to my door, and my mind went blank. Remembering the endless news stories about scams, I asked them to prove who they were. The officer promptly showed his police ID and gave me the station's landline number so I could check. They explained calmly that they were just "doing things by the rules." As for turning up without warning, they said renting in the houses around here was "rather complicated," so they came by regularly to check. "We'll be back at this time tomorrow, so we'd ask for your cooperation then."

"I won't be staying here tomorrow at this time," I muttered resentfully. Then it dawned on me that "welcome home," on Airbnb, may not be as simple as you or I would like.

Images: Airbnb