Country Garden Yue Fu, Zhongnan, Kunming

Set in Yunnan, a region of distinctive character, the project aims to match the province's cultural richness. Shuishi Design draws on the yikeyin, or one-seal, a traditional Yunnan courtyard house: the building takes the square posture of the seal to define the project, while the landscape expands outward from the sky well, opening from to outer court so that the building stays square yet loses its enclosure. Building and landscape interlock into a basic layout of one house and two courtyards. The site sits about two meters above the municipal road, with public green belts on south and east. Drawing on Yunnan's colorful terraced fields, the design resolves the grade with flower-sea terraces that form the first urban interface, enclosing without blocking and framing the boundary through rural memory. Upturned eaves and timber structure are reconstructed in modern form as the gatehouse: half-open umbrella ribs support the flying eave on one side while folded mountain forms push to the other, and the kinetic eave naturally absorbs the west-side parking entrance. Overlapping roof tiles hang like a curtain from the eave and meet water to form a unique spatial experience. Stepping up into the first open courtyard, tile—the cheap, culturally charged local material—becomes the main design material, laid purely over ground; layered dark tile sits beneath a thin sheet of water where a few red fish glide between water and cloud. A pavilion mediates between water and building as a volumetric and spatial response, its mass dissolved into pure geometry and modern metal lines, and a small arched stone bridge draws the eye across the water. Walking the water, turning once, twice, and finally meeting a gnarled boxwood, one enters the building after three bends, building and landscape in tacit balance: white walls, dark tile, extended eaves, water as cloth. The inner courtyard, roughly 18 by 26 meters and derived from the one-seal's sky well at about one quarter of the building and one third of the front court, continues tile, stepping stones, gravel, placed stones, water and feature trees in a restrained treatment of building, sky and cloud; a large placed stone over the water with a falling stream, beside a gnarled pine, anchors the scene, and stepping stones cross the water at least one meter wide to avoid fragmented composition. The 61,000-square-meter project includes a 7,420-square-meter demonstration landscape in Guandu District, Kunming.