Jinan China reading hole spirit paradise mountain foothill

The Tree Hollow Sprite Playground sits at the rear of the demonstration zone for Zhonghai Yuelushan in Jinan, a roughly 792-square-metre children's landscape whose design is inspired by the fairy-tale tree hollow. Extending the project's overall forest-and-mountain-residence natural palette, the designers at Lorka Children (the children's design studio of L&A Design, Beijing) set out to create an artistic, whimsical and playfully childlike garden that will later double as the permanent children's activity ground of the larger residential community. The original site was a concealed, narrow and sunken space beside the community activity centre, 5.4 metres high and 11 metres wide, feeling like an oppressive closed box. To open it up, the team broke through the retaining wall of the original plan to forge a more natural, intimate threshold, and adopted a graded slope to resolve the height difference while bringing sunlight, trees and water down to the children's level, keeping the maximum gradient below 40 percent and carefully engineering drainage so the slope stays dry. The site is organised into four zones - an entrance court, the fantastical tree hollow, the joyful stream and the burrow hill - with circulation paths woven across multiple levels to serve all age groups, reachable from the sales office on the first floor, from the future neighbourhood and from the gym on the lower ground floor. The two tree hollows form the landmark, their warm yellow and earth-toned sculptural shapes resembling sprite houses; at night, light glows from their openings and breathing windows flicker to heighten the fairy-tale mood. Inside they house speaking tubes, optical-illusion turntables, crawl tubes, stepping bridges, balance beams, climbing nets, lounging nets, viewing platforms, telescopes and a large slide. A winding stream descends from the upper ground into a circular play pool fitted with interactive jets, sluices and foot-soaking basins, where children can touch the IP tree-sprite's palm to trigger natural sounds and control the water level. The rounded burrow hill is embedded in the lawn, its curved surfaces generating slopes for crawling and a small slide for toddlers, with magical lighting glowing inside after dark. The tree hollow is built from double-curved stainless steel, shop-fabricated, pre-assembled, cut into sections and crane-lifted on site; the burrow hill is moulded from high-strength fibreglass using 3D-printed foam masters to guarantee fidelity to the design model, and the organic stream geometry required close collaboration between designers and contractors to refine profiles and levels.