9 Midea Beijing Road, Kunming

A fused aesthetic scene, the designers at Daoyuan Yifang Studio believe, should be like a good jazz performance: inclusive, free, restrained, yet full of climax. Starting from a scene of restored and refined nature, the design for Midea Beijing Road No.9 in Kunming fuses modern life into a pure picture, and treats architecture, interior and landscape as the three core jazz instruments, mutually dependent and tightly integrated, blurring disciplinary boundaries. In searching for solutions and aesthetics, landscape continuously negotiates the relationship between city, building, interior and inner courtyard, simultaneously converting open edges and pocket gardens, never letting go of a chance for surprise. Continuously conveying the idea of bringing nature home, the project merges opportunities for interacting with nature across landscape, architecture and interior. Unlike a traditional demonstration area with clear front and back, the landscape is fused into a whole: on the urban edge, it uses generous, simple forms to frame the building, with classic, precise details supporting the atmosphere; inside, the building lets people walk into the landscape, and the landscape is embedded within the building, producing a unified design experience. The two-level building organizes the basement around a central courtyard with a swimming pool, cigar bar and tea room, which the landscape imagines as a tropical rainforest—a wild-luxury, highly refined space. Simulating nature is not easy: trunk thickness, pose, edge materials and placement are resolved on site through multi-angle judgment. Client, designer and contractor together traveled the country selecting stone surfaces, balancing innovation and stability in planting, and coordinating the three disciplines through a layout that was deliberately difficult to build. Beginning from a romantic community scene and a pro-nature impulse, the design hides the building in a rainforest; then, in execution, it rationally chooses every material and every tree and sequences construction conditions on site. Between intervention and rational return, the aim is a warm space that produces a flicker of happiness the moment one steps in.