Site and Program
The site consists of four residential plots tightly enclosed by the surrounding parcels. The houses on the site had long been abandoned, and some had deteriorated into seriously unsafe structures. The site also contains a large tree that the client hoped to preserve.
The dereliction of these houses reflects a problem commonly encountered in rural revitalization projects: the hollowing-out of villages.
The fundamental strategy for addressing this issue is to bring people and new programs back into the village.
The client wanted a rural homestay with centralized management and operations, suitable for family stays. This vision eventually took shape as Mountain Muse Lodging&Nature, a homestay themed around Natural Curiosity.

A Dilemma
When the Mountain Muse project was launched, construction of Section Homestay—the first project to open in Lindu Warm Village—was nearing completion. Its distinctive architectural form was already taking shape, and we felt confident about it.
For a moment, I was tempted to take the easy route and replicate the design logic of Section Homestay. After all, a consistent design approach can create a coherent overall character. But should I really do that? On reflection, the answer was clearly no.
Although the two buildings serve the same function and their sites are close to each other, their positioning, scale, and site conditions are entirely different.
Section Homestay faces an open site with ample room to expand, whereas Mountain Muse Lodging&Nature is tightly enclosed by neighboring plots. The two projects also differ greatly in scale, so the previous design logic was clearly not appropriate here.
If this site were in a CBD, a building of just over 1,000 square meters would be extremely small—more like a neighborhood service center. A single-purpose building of this scale might hardly seem worth considering. In a village, however, it is a very large building. How should we handle this “giant”?
Inspiration
While looking through photographs of the site, I thought of Le Calcul Mental, a representative Surrealist painting by Belgian artist René Magritte. Against a traditional rural backdrop, a series of white geometric forms appear in astonishing ways—some floating, others embedded in the scene. The result is dreamlike and extraordinary. Resembling the plaster geometric solids found in a drawing studio, these forms are nevertheless monumental in scale. This striking contrast with the surrounding environment felt remarkably relevant to our project.
Why not give it a try?

Making a Mountain
Magritte was a painter, and geometric forms from drawing studios were familiar elements in his work. What I wanted to borrow was the Surrealist way of presenting things, not the specific imagery itself.
In my mind, Jiangnan would not be Jiangnan without its closely packed rooftops, its small bridges and flowing water, or its mountains. Those who know my work may be familiar with my persistent fascination with “making mountains.”
Subtracting the Mass
Even though the building takes the form of a “mountain,” we wanted it to feel approachable in scale rather than overwhelmingly imposing. We first tilted the exterior walls inward. This both reinforced the mountain-like metaphor and reduced the sense of oppression at pedestrian level. We had used a similar approach before, in the GEMDALE FUNLAND Sijing Commercial Center.
A less rigid and monotonous building outline can also help reduce its imposing presence.
The original building footprint was formed by connecting the enclosing exterior walls of houses on the different residential plots. Following the contours of the site, the building’s perimeter became an assembly of angled segments. To preserve a setback around the large tree, we also introduced a local recess in the building outline. This both emphasizes the entrance and softens the building’s overall mass.
A mountain is three-dimensional, so we also “carved” it in section. While maintaining the unity of the overall form, we introduced setbacks and terraces to extend usable space and further reduce the sense of oppression.

Floating
For a period, I explored ways of expressing architectural design and spatial relationships through verbs or states of being.
Surrealist presentation is inherently theatrical. A mountain simply standing on the ground was not dramatic enough. I wanted to make the mountain “float”—a rather cool concept.
To make the mountain appear to “float,” the ground floor had to recede visually. The building has three floors. The second floor and above form an irregular mass composed of faceted planes, alluding to a white mountain. The ground floor has a relatively regular outline, is finished in black, and is set back from the upper levels. By visually diminishing the ground floor, we created the impression that the mountain is floating.

Floor Plan
Once the massing relationships had been established, my first instinct was to create a continuous promenade, like a boardwalk, with spatial experiences suggestive of the mountain—caves, cliffs, and the like—carrying the mountain concept through the entire building. The client was pleasantly surprised by the architectural image of the mountain, but had serious reservations about the floor-plan organization. And rightly so: an idealized visitor route can conflict sharply with the experience of living in an individual room. Public space is important, of course, but the quality of the living experience matters just as much to guests. I could not simply indulge my own ideas.
The client wanted every unit to have good natural light and extended living space, a relatively independent entrance for each unit, generous interiors, and an appropriate proportion of duplex units.
I therefore adjusted the strategy slightly, translating these requirements into three basic prototypes: linear, “田”-shaped, and duplex layouts. Each type can be extended with a courtyard or terrace. By combining the units in a modular arrangement, we were also able to provide relatively independent entrances.
Kitchen and Dining Room
In addition to the main building, two detached houses on the western plot had fallen into disrepair and were unsafe. They were separate from the main building and were repurposed as the kitchen and dining room. Creating two smaller “mountains” here would have looked rather absurd.
We noticed that the original buildings had distinctive brickwork with a hollow-core pattern, so we retained portions of it. To address these two ruins, we used the strategies of “insertion” and “nesting” respectively, clearly expressing the relationship between the renovated areas and the existing structures.

Construction
The mountain-like form helps alleviate the oppressive effect of the building’s large mass, but its complexity also raised the client’s concerns about construction difficulty and cost control. Through discussions with the structural engineer, we refined the way the exterior walls were built. The structure remains a variation on a frame system. By adding continuous tie reinforcement, walls inclined at appropriate angles Floating could still be built with lightweight masonry blocks, substantially reducing the dead load of cantilevered areas.
Parts of the inclined walls on the second and third floors are finished with a beige stone-textured coating to create the faceted form of the “mountain.” The ground-floor outline is set back from the upper floors and finished with black stone-textured coating, creating a sense of “floating.”
In the end, the complex architectural form was achieved while keeping construction relatively straightforward and costs under control.

Mountain
At the project-approval stage, buildings are usually identified by a series of cumbersome plot numbers. During construction, everyone naturally began calling this unusually shaped building “Mountain.” Later, when the client asked what the building should be named, I thought “Mountain” worked perfectly well.
Once the operational theme was confirmed, the concept of a nature-focused learning experience—featuring activities such as observing insects and reptiles—aligned perfectly with the mountain-inspired design. We hope that the rural natural-history experience of staying in Mountain Muse will become a cherished memory for families and children.
Village and City
When I saw the aerial photographs after completion, what seemed even more fantastical than the floating white mountain was the Suzhou Bay New District in the distance, across Lake Tai. Against the rural landscape, it appeared like a mirage. The most striking landmark was the Suzhou Bay Cultural Center, designed by French architect Christian de Portzamparc. This mirage-like appearance—and a 370-meter-long, oversized building inspired by a flowing ribbon—could itself be considered a form of Surrealism.
Both villages and cities are constantly evolving. The traces of each era become important parts of their fabric, yet may also be replaced as society develops.

Team:
Design Firm: Wutopia Lab
Chief Architect: Yu Ting
Project Architect: Huang He
Design Team: Mo Mo (Intern), Zhuang Yinfei (Intern), Lin Jianming (Intern)
Technical Design: Jiangsu Huaya Engineering Design Research Institute Co., Ltd.
Technical Design Team: Qiao Ye, Chen Jieru, Chen Xiangyang, Zhu Qinyu, Yang Jinping, Xu Huqing
Lighting Consultants: Chloe Zhang, Wei Shiyu
Client: Jingcheng Cultural Tourism Development (Suzhou) Co., Ltd.
Material: Stone-textured coating
Photography: CreatAR Images