Zhu An

Bamboo Cottage is a private residence designed for the painter Meng Zhong and his wife, on the edge of an old village in Xizhou, Dali, Yunnan, adjacent to extensive rice fields. The inwardness of the new courtyard house matches that of the traditional courtyard houses around it, and its straw-lime render, a common and inexpensive Dali exterior material of lime mixed with straw, binds the new building visually to its neighbours. The house is divided into an entrance hall, front court, middle court, and rear court, the last reserved for the owners' private use. Nine courtyards of varying scale reduce the dimensions of the traditional courtyard-house typology and link it to a series of functional rooms. The south-western entry sequence includes two 180-degree turns that lead visitors to the southern court. A western gallery court serves as a direct route to the private quarters, offering a glimpse of the middle court's water along the way. An enclosed dining room sits between front and middle courts; from the living room, the view east is over the rice fields, while westward one sees the middle-court pool and, beyond the western gallery court's planting and rocks, the tiled roofs of neighbouring houses. The private quarters are organized around four courtyards of differing scale and orientation, so that sunlight enters from varied directions and the spatial atmosphere shifts through the day. Structural elements are deliberately concealed: walls are 200 millimetres thick so that, once rendered, columns and infill become indistinguishable. The southern court includes an 8-metre clear span, requiring 600-millimetre-deep beams; these are reversed above the floor slab so that they disappear from view. In this house, structural expression is secondary, and light, shadow, water, plants, and the owner's collected furniture take over as the primary materials.