Text description provided by the architects
The Longguang Yangguangshui'an rooftop garden in Chaozhou is a 400-square-meter private residential roof landscape designed by Ruyi Landscape. The project is framed as a gift to life, a quiet garden embedded in the bustling city where residents can brew Gongfu tea with friends and family while their daughters dart like sprites through the grasses. In Eastern philosophy, a garden is never finished on the day construction ends; a true garden grows with its owners, alongside sun, plants, and water, and reaching the ideal garden requires both designer and dweller. A wood-tone platform adjacent to the interior marks the opening of the outdoor roof garden; palm shadows fall across the ground as a footnote to a tropical mood. Since the owners have not traveled to desert dunes, the design brings a tropical feel through arid-region planting, fresh and wild, so that residents feel beside the sea without leaving home. From a height, the terrace overlooks both the cooking smoke of small villages and the neon traffic of the city. A dark slatted pergola casts climbing shadows, and a mirror-polished marble feature wall accented with copper ripple motifs forms the backdrop for tea-time conversation. The paving deliberately uses bold color shifts and even small decorative flower tiles, and a colorful spinning chair invites children into a lively domestic scene. Plain stepping stones and dark gravel pair with airy foxtail asparagus in just the right proportion, and the planting is varied in form, color, and character. The project includes a playful easter egg: when the designer casually asked a young child what she wanted to be, the answer, straight out of a television commercial, was an astronaut. The team painted a large astronaut mural on the wall to remember her dream and wait for it to echo back. Project details are limited in the source material.
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