On the western edge of Kunming, where the city gives way to Dianchi Lake, the Western Hills at dusk trace the outline of a woman lying on her side. Locals call it the Sleeping Beauty at Sunset. Hillside Retreat sits in that view.
The owner is a Yunnan entrepreneur who wanted to turn his villa into something more considered — a home that could hold his full idea of how life should be lived. It had to work for private family life and for hosting: friends, business partners, long afternoons of tea, proper dinners. He collects natural marble and amber. He has a growing appetite for contemporary art. He drinks pu'er, keeps pine trees, and has a real feeling for the way Kyoto architecture manages to be classical and modern at once.
I completed this project as co-founder of Puform Architecture. The architects handled the structural renovation and spatial plan. Everything you can touch, sit on, drink from, or look at was mine — the complete interior styling, from concept through design, sourcing, and procurement, to placing every last object on site myself. Furniture, lighting, rugs, bedding, paintings, tea ware, down to the kettle and tray in the guest room.
The approach was curatorial — staging an exhibition of one man's domestic and social life, as well as his inner world. Someone rooted in Yunnan, drawn to the world beyond it.
The ground-floor living room is anchored by a log-burning fireplace and a full wall of books, furnished with one-off timber pieces gathered across Asia and deep corduroy sofas. Somewhere for the owner's morning read, a quiet drink before bed, or for a guest to land and feel immediately at ease. The top-floor salon is a different mood — it opens straight onto the Sleeping Beauty, with a copper bar top and a small tea station where you can brew a pot or grill tofu over coals. Modern fixtures, Yunnan rituals.
The tea room is where I spent the most time. In Yunnan, everyone has their own way with tea, and the room had to respect that. I found a table with the right material quality but no heaviness — refined enough for the setting, light enough to sit gracefully in a compact room where you can turn and see the koi pond through the glass. The tea ware came from a ceramics gallery in Shenzhen, pieces that give the ritual of brewing its proper weight from the first pour. The owner's marble specimens — previously locked away in storage — were reframed and hung on the walls, turning a private collection into part of the everyday view. In the dining room, a large oil painting by Su Jiaxi, a young Kunming-based artist. It has a slow depth — not the kind of work that grabs you on first glance, but once your eye settles, it stays.
This project was featured in _AD China_, May 2020:
A complete exercise in interior styling as creative practice — reading someone closely, then making that understanding into a space they can live in.