In Ancient Alleys, Modern Comforts@Lifestyle

Liu Heung Shing is among a growing number of foreigners refurbishing Beijing’s traditional courtyard houses with a modern sensibility.

By DAN LEVIN
Published: July 24, 2008

BeijingA STROLL through one of this city’s labyrinthine hutongs — alleys lined with courtyard houses that wind away from the boulevards and public squares — offers glimpses of a back street life mostly hidden behind the gray walls on either side: chain-smoking old men sitting at a checkerboard, a workman intent on a lunch of steamed dumplings, a cobbler hunched over a pair of worn canvas shoes. Occasionally an open door reveals a warren of cramped passageways or a courtyard packed with battered bicycles, caged songbirds and clothes hung out to dry in the hazy sunlight.

Just as on the main streets, the air is filled with construction dust and the din of car horns and of wood being cut. But when Liu Heung Shing, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, slips through the red doors of his siheyuan, or traditional one-story courtyard home, off a hutong just north of the Forbidden City, the cacophony ceases. Inside the house — which Mr. Liu spent two years and more than $1 million buying and restoring — the frenzy of the new Beijing gives way to the peace of the central courtyard. Here, the smog seems to have lifted, and all that can be heard is the breeze in the two 130-year-old pomegranate trees above.

“Chinese believe that in a siheyuan you can feel the spirit of the earth,” he said on a recent afternoon, “because unlike in a high-rise apartment, you step on it every day.”

In fact, though, Mr. Liu is one of many siheyuan owners in Beijing who are not Chinese, at least officially. He was born in Hong Kong and is an American citizen. He and his wife, Karen Smith, an English art historian, are among a growing number of foreigners who have invested in the houses in recent years, refurbishing them with the mix of modern sensibility and respect for original detail one expects of a high-end renovation in Brooklyn or East London. At a time when the siheyuans, some of them centuries old, have been disappearing at an alarming rate, these renovators, along with some newly moneyed Chinese ones, are emerging as the city’s best hope for holding on to what’s left of the old hutongs, even as they transform dwellings that once housed dozens of people into private homes for their own small families, and provoke many of the same anxieties that gentrifiers do in the West.

For 18 years, since the municipal government here began a program of demolishing “old and dilapidated housing,” Beijing has been erasing and remaking itself in a rush to win and then prepare for the Olympics, and to capitalize on the new market economy. Land usage rights have been transferred to well-connected developers, historic buildings have been razed, and hundreds of thousands of residents of the city center have been displaced. Of the 3,000 to 7,000 hutongs believed to have existed at the time of the 1949 revolution, according to the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, only about 1,000, comprising some 30,000 siheyuans, remain.

“These houses are volumes of the city’s history, written in brick and beams,” said Michael Meyer, the author of the new book “The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed.” But “the real heritage of Beijing that’s being lost isn’t just the architecture, but the dense social network within it,” he added. “In a hutong, you can’t honk your horn without hearing about it later. People look out for one another.” Even in the hutongs that survive, the new class of siheyuan owner, some fear, may ultimately mean an end to that world.

MR. LIU and Ms. Smith fell in love with their siheyuan on a 4,500-square-foot plot in the city’s Xicheng district in 1994. The long story of their effort to buy and renovate it — which involved fraught negotiations with its occupants, deciphering Beijing’s shadowy zoning laws and mastering guanxi, the web of personal connections that are essential to dealing with local authorities — was fairly typical of the challenges faced by those who take on siheyuans.

Like many siheyuans, the house was in utter disrepair; after the 1949 revolution the Mao government turned most of them into group residences that soon became ramshackle slums, without heating, indoor plumbing or privacy. But before beginning work, the couple had to persuade the former owner’s maid and her family to vacate it, which they finally did, Mr. Liu said, after he and Ms. Smith bought them an apartment elsewhere in the city. Because Mr. Liu is not a Chinese citizen, it took two years to obtain permission from local authorities to buy the house. And since the property was behind the Imperial Palace and near many of the city’s other major cultural landmarks (as well as the homes of high-ranking party members, including Deng Xiaoping), he had to submit his renovation plans to the city preservation bureau. Once he had permission, “I rebuilt it brick by brick,” he said. The finished house, with a 3,500-square-foot interior, combines design details from the imperial era with modern amenities like a cedar-lined sauna and skylights. In the courtyard — “the soul of the siheyuan,” as Mr. Liu put it — pinewood pillars were painted red, like those at the Forbidden City (though burgundy was chosen rather than the more familiar revolutionary crimson), and polished to a high sheen by builders who had first applied several layers of pigs’ blood.

Mr. Liu, 56, spent years traveling the world for Time and The Associated Press, but in Beijing he and his wife have settled into Chinese tradition even in their landscaping; they carefully preserved the two old pomegranate trees, for example, whose plump seeds, from which they make juice, represent fertility, as do the goldfish that they keep in the murky green waters of a Ming dynasty stone urn nearby.

Mr. Liu, for one, does not seem concerned about his role as a gentrifier. In spite of the huge increase in property values in the city in general and his district in particular in recent years, he said, the neighborhood’s makeup has changed relatively little since they moved in. “It’s ordinary residents of Beijing, workers, artists and people who sell fresh vegetables and bean curd products,” he said.

Several blocks east, in the Dongcheng district, Tom Luckock, 33, an Australian lawyer who began rebuilding a siheyuan three years ago with his wife, Zhang Yue, acknowledged that his hutong has been “changing a bit.” But he, too, maintained that its social life is relatively stable (at least as long as the government respects the protected status it recently conferred on his neighborhood and several others). His neighbors include members of the new upper-middle class, like an executive at the Chinese computer maker Lenovo, and longtime residents, like the two people who “still get up at 5:30 each morning and sit on a stool in the alley and watch everything go by” after more than 75 years in the hutong.

What has struck Mr. Luckock about his neighbors, and about most Chinese, is their uncomprehending attitude toward his preservationist bent. The couple’s Chinese friends were flabbergasted, he said, by his desire to reuse old bricks, doors and wooden beams in the renovation of the 200-year-old building. “My neighbors would come in and say, ‘You’re spending so much money on your place but can’t afford new materials?’ ” he added.

Mr. Luckock spent three years trolling back streets and endured dozens of failed negotiations before finding his 2,000-square-foot residence, a decrepit shell for which he paid $240,000 in his wife’s mother’s name, he said, to skirt foreign-ownership restrictions. The renovation, which cost $85,000, was meant to take three months but stretched out to 18, largely because of Mr. Luckock’s obsession with old materials.

The house abounds with salvaged items from the site and beyond. Floors are made from old wooden doors the couple found in the countryside; the living room mantle piece, a stone step carved with horses, was rescued from a roadside; and gold paintings above the front door and woodwork in the entrance hall survive from the imperial era. When workers found 200-year-old bricks beneath a listing plaster wall, Mr. Luckock had each one numbered so they could be put back as found.

Still, artifacts were lost: a wall bearing the scrawl “long live Chairman Mao” collapsed, and workers tore down a Qing dynasty fresco. “The problem is the workers all want to use everything new because it’s easier and the Chinese don’t appreciate the old,” he said.

Not everything hews to tradition. There is a whirlpool off the courtyard for cold nights, a grill worthy of suburbia stands at the ready, and the couple drink their coffee barefoot in the grass. “You can never have enough grass in Beijing,” Mr. Luckock explained. “Plus, the original cement slabs are impossible to find.”
It took Ms. Zhang, who is 28 and grew up in Beijing, some time to see the value in her husband’s approach. “I’m Chinese, and we like everything brand new,” she said. “But as a little girl I lived in a siheyuan with my grandmother, and every summer we would have dinner outside. Living here brings back those memories.”
FOR Antonia Sampson, an English homemaker, rebuilding her siheyuan has meant “an enhanced relationship with Beijing,” largely because of the communal life of her hutong, which is also in Dongcheng. Being on the alley, she said, “you share walls with your neighbors, you’re far more connected to your community.”

After she and her husband, Charles, the chief executive of Saatchi and Saatchi Beijing, bought the house in late 2006, for an amount she would not divulge, they hired Antonio Ochoa, a Venezuelan architect who has lived in China for 20 years, to help them remake it. “I wanted to honor the traditional premise while introducing modern comforts,” said Ms. Sampson, 41, “but felt I couldn’t do it myself.”

Mr. Ochoa said he focused on simple, functional solutions to the problems posed by the building’s 1,400-square-foot plan, likening efficient design to feng sui. “The free flow of energy is very related to what we in the West call functionality,” he said.

A glass box kitchen connects the lofty pine-beamed living room to the bathrooms, closets and bedrooms, which are adorned with tatami mats. “In the morning there is always a blast of sunshine,” said Ms. Sampson, standing at the sink. “You get a wonderful lift, which is lovely, since I’m British and used to terrible weather.”

Faced with street noise and winter winds penetrating the antique wooden door, Mr. Ochoa added a glass partition. To offer privacy yet allow for the courtyard’s daylight to flow through the house, he designed sliding floor-to-ceiling windows screened by removable wooden grids, and installed skylights in the hallway.

A quadrangle fish pool frames the white Peking marble courtyard, creating a bridge between the living room and bedrooms, which are on two levels, and contributing to the tranquillity of the space. “People come in and sit down here and just chill,” Ms. Sampson said. “It’s as if you’re in the country and not in the city.”

The effect on the neighborhood, in her view, has been positive. When the project was under construction, she said, “local passers-by came walking in — that’s the way it is in Beijing, it goes with the territory — and oohed and aahed, everyone loved it.” Once it was done, she added, “our neighbor — he has lived here for 50 years — started renovating his siheyuan.”

As for what may be lost in all this home improvement, Ms. Sampson, referring to one of the communal activities that characterized siheyuan living in the old days, seemed as sanguine as Mr. Liu and Mr. Luckock. “I don’t think going to the hutong lavatory,” she said, “really heightens your hutong experience.”

@Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/garden/24beijing.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=design