Architect redesigns village to create tourist draw

A creative architect from Hengshanwu in Zhejiang province has turned the fortunes of his flagging hometown around by transforming it into a homestay resort.

"I am a returnee, and people here call me the village chief," Chen Gu told a group of visitors as he showed them around his brainchild Villa & Resort, a cluster of homestays, cafes and nightclubs tucked away in the rugged mountains of Anji county.

The 52-year-old pointed to an outdoor billboard illustrating the project. It carried a selection of photos reminiscent of the village's past: muddy dirt roads, garbage piles, stinky waterways and bare hilltops due to mining activities more than 20 years ago.

"It was once a 'hollowed-out village'," he said, referring to the exodus of younger people that has beset many rural communities across China.

"When I took over the village in 2012, just a few older residents were left."

Despite the downsides, the village today is thriving and is only a three-hour drive from most major cities in Zhejiang, as well as neighboring Jiangsu province and Shanghai. The new highways and tunnels, part of a provincewide campaign in recent decades to foster urban-rural equality, make the travel possible.

The people that can be found in the areas nearby have underpinned Chen's design: he envisioned a hideaway serving urbanites who wish for a two-night getaway from the hustle and bustle of city life.

A graduate from a renowned fine art school in Beijing and longtime freelance architect before returning to Anji in 2005, Chen said he was not a fan of bulldozing everything and starting from scratch. He has a fondness for the beauty of rural landscapes, where building materials for homes, such as stone and timber, are mostly sourced locally and blend into the environment.

He worked with a State-owned tourism company to buy the standalone farmhouses from villagers and moved their former owners to a nearby community.

Chen carried out a thorough evaluation of the 20 homes, and renovated most of them for safety and aesthetic considerations, but largely kept their original looks. They also built more to bolster capacity.

Advertisements were posted to recruit "tenants" to run businesses inside the farmhouses, such as homestays, restaurants and dress shops, and also venues including a library and a swimming pool.

After interviews, Chen ended up with 35 business owners who are from a mix of regions from the inland city of Xi'an to Hong Kong.

"We help them design and decorate their businesses and offer training courses," he said, adding that the tenants pay rent and hand over a part of their revenue in return.

"Here you can have almost every cuisine, from Chinese to Western to Japanese," he said.

With an aim to provide an immersive experience, Chen bundles the services on offer into tourism packages that visitors can buy with a lump sum.

For example, parents taking one child along can follow the designed route and first have lunch at a waterfront restaurant — formerly a farmhouse by a fish pond — and then check in at a nearby homestay. Then they get a ticket for an afternoon dessert at a cafe where people can also read and work. Children can be sent to take handicraft courses or follow an instructor to learn about plants at a nearby tea plantation.

Last year, Villa& Resort received more than 350,000 visitors.

The resort is the epitome of the shift made by rural areas in Zhejiang province to pursue sustainable development.

In the early 2000s — when Xi Jinping was Party chief of Zhejiang — the Green Rural Revival Program was launched provincewide to improve the rural living environment. In the decades that followed, the program has morphed and expanded to reduce the urban-rural gap in a range of areas such as income and public services.

Now the coastal province is among the wealthiest in China with the narrowest urban-rural wealth gap.