The houses in the wilderness I Anna garden

House in the Wilderness, or Anna Garden, is a private residence in the hills of Changping District, thirty kilometres north of central Beijing, renovated over fifteen months by KiKi Architecture (Akiyoshi Ayaka and Wang Tianping). The project holds the owner's childhood memories of rural life—not specific remembered objects, but memory itself. The 1,300-square-metre site contains a large garden and an incongruous 200-square-metre European-style house, and that mismatch triggered the studio's decision to rebuild the relationship between house and land. The existing eight-metre level difference is exploited so that the lower garden and upper house connect through landscape elements that layer the view and set a tone of freedom and wildness. Without compromising structure, the European decorative facade was stripped away and replaced by simple geometric volumes in northern red brick, returning the house to an honest, childlike primitivism. At the east main entrance, an original projecting porch is hidden behind a perforated brick wall that fuses a screen-wall concept with laid-brick craft, adding privacy while also accommodating a semi-outdoor hot tub. Inside, the ground floor holds living spaces and the first floor private rooms; in a minimalist key, irregular interweavings of function, structure and material keep the interior lively, with raw timber and micro-cement responding to the rural setting and red-brick accents distilling the building itself. Folding glass walls wrap the former outer gallery on the ground floor, flooding the house with light and dissolving interior-exterior boundaries; the garden's stepped terraces continue inside as curved platforms, so that when the walls open the dining room, living room and tea room become one with the outdoors. Outside, an entrance arbour with a triangular grid echoes the roof form and is clothed in vines, terminating at an old persimmon tree; to the north, layered curved terraces fall like steps, holding a small viewing hut and a four-cornered brick pavilion that read as two floating islands, while a stone path loops the whole garden. Planting, by the specialist Wildscape team, uses northern grasses, ferns, gaura and hydrangea in naturalistic drifts rather than formal beds, so the house is wrapped by a layered, breathing garden that restores memory and lets time slow down.