In Suzhou, a Contemporary European Interior Built Around a Traditional Garden

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25 Sept

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Zhang Haihua of Z+H Renhai Design brought a Ming dynasty-style garden and an Italian-influenced interior together through a painterly view

The client who commissioned the Pingmenli residence supplies textiles to Western fashion brands, and read classical Chinese poetry as a boy. Haihua Zhang, founder of Z+H Renhai Design, built the house around that juxtaposition — a contemporary 1,000-square-metre residence near Suzhou’s Taohuawu district, wrapped around a 700-square-metre traditional garden, both raised from bare ground.

Inside, the references are Italian: Molteni&C furniture, wood veneer, bronze fittings. Outside, the garden is unambiguously Jiangnan — Taihu stone rockery, water and a timber pavilion, in the Ming dynasty manner of the famous residences a few hundred metres away. Zhang’s question was the seam between them: ‘The most challenging part is how to make the balance of Western contemporary style with Chinese traditional element in a harmonious way,’ he says. The fault line ran along the facade and, more precisely, the windows.

His answer was to let each side stay foreign to the other. ‘When you are inside the room and you look out, the curtain blends with the Suzhou garden — it looks like a painting, the window frames the view,’ says Zhang. ‘If you stand in the garden and look into the living room, you feel like you’re looking into an Italian contemporary home.’ The difference isn’t dissolved so much as framed twice, from opposite sides.

The textiles took longest. Because of the client’s expertise, curtain selection took several rounds, and Zhang held one line through all of them: ‘The colours of all the textiles should have some relation with the landscape elements outdoor,’ he says.

The garden was built by hand by a master stoneworker — ‘probably one of the last generations who knows how to build it’, Zhang says — with Taihu stone from the lake and the rest sourced city by city. Asked which one thing he’d take to his own home, Zhang names the magnolia in front of the living room, tall enough to reach the second floor and, for a few weeks a year, to flower. In ancient China the tree signalled a family’s fortune; here it faces the youngest daughter’s bedroom.

Text by Katherine Ring
Images by Cai Yunpu and Wang Xiaohan