Zhongnanhai Kaijun

Zhonghai Nankai Jun, a residential landscape project in the Haihe Education Park of Tianjin developed by China Overseas Real Estate Tianjin and designed by L&A Design's Beijing studio, is conceived as a personal mountain-forest retreat carved out of the city, where fragrance of trees and layered greenery offer a quiet counterpoint to daily haste. The roughly 8,650-square-metre garden is organised as a six-chambered promenade that fuses xieyi landscape painting with a clean modern vocabulary, drawing on warm, elegant, playful, Zen-inflected readings of domestic life. The first chamber, "One Hidden, the realm of square and circle," frames the urban threshold with paired Chinese crabapple trees and a central Scholar's Rock sculpture shaped like a miniature mountain, setting a Zen tone that distinguishes the quiet interior from the bustling city outside. The second, "Two Stored, high mountains and flowing water," releases visitors from the lobby into a misted passage where a stone screen rises, water cascades down its face, and light shifts across a narrow corridor until the path suddenly opens. The third, "Three Sought, blossoms like brocade," winds between clipped hedges and planted walls through a flower-filled alley that evokes the natural refinement of mountain waterside dwelling. The fourth, "Four Gazed, moonlight through pines," pairs a gurgling fountain with a sculpted ancient pine, while the stone screen acts as a curtain through which framed views of trees and pinpoints of light appear. The fifth, "Five Viewed, flying waterfall in a rocky gorge," culminates in the central courtyard, still water and planting mirroring one another in a near, far, and reflected layering that makes the sitting room feel extended toward a miniature mountain-scape. The sixth, "Six Appreciated, the shallow mountain study," completes the sequence as a quiet tea room where still water functions as a mirror for clouds by day and stars by night. The project's closing argument is that a city of Tianjin's noise still contains, within Nankai Jun, an artistic residence where light, water and tree shadow allow one to shed worldly polish and slow down.