Hei Inns

The Hei Guesthouse in Moganshan, Deqing, Zhejiang, is a renovation that combines a century-old Huizhou-style hall house and a two-storey structure built in 1985, set in a valley village where bamboo forest surrounds the buildings on three sides and a public stone staircase divides the sloping ground into several terraces above a small stream. The two houses are offset by nearly 18 degrees, with their closest separation just one metre on the west side. The front building is largely retained and restored, while the rear building's internal timber structure is completely rebuilt, leaving almost only its eastern rammed-earth wall. The two are treated as a single composition: portions are cut out to form a half-enclosed, irregular light well, and an external steel staircase threads between them, both serving circulation and tightening the unity of the whole. A new single-storey room on the west side and a roof-level promenade further bind the two volumes into an organic mass. The outdoor design borrows classical garden methods: a pond is excavated between the houses, a stone slab bridge links the ground-floor public rooms, and the column-free external steel stair floats above the water. Using the mountain as a boundary wall, reorganized stone paths climb to the roof steel gallery, enclosing the terrace and pond; multiple framing and borrowed-view devices make this a genuinely open, three-dimensional landscape garden rather than a city-built rock-and-water imitation. Folded lines are used indoors and out as the most abstract distillation of nature. The architects argue that Chinese design should be carried in spirit, not in literal form: modern materials such as steel, cast-in-place beams, and floor-to-ceiling glass are used openly, with colours echoing the retained historic fabric. Inside, L-shaped and Z-shaped spatial sequences create layered, playful movement, each turn revealing a new view; rammed earth, concrete, and solid wood are left honestly exposed, with bamboo screens and lighting softening the rough surfaces. Because large machinery could not reach the site, the original ground-floor rammed-earth wall was demolished and reused as partition walls in the rear building, so the renovation reads as a redistribution of existing material resources. Completed in 2018 by HEI Architectural Design Studio under lead designer Peng Xianfei, with 254 square metres of floor area, the result is both traditional and modern, accepted and enjoyed by young guests.