Urban Haute Living, Forest Retreat in Shu
Located beside the historic Jinniu Hotel and Tianfu Art Park in Chengdu, Guobin No.7 Residence sits within a protected character zone shaped by the traditional spatial language of western Sichuan courtyards, forests, and water. The architectural vision proposed a clear ambition: to create a residence where living in a garden and living with a garden become one and the same. For the landscape, this demanded more than surface decoration. The project became an exploration of how inherited regional form could be reinterpreted through a contemporary lens to support ultra-luxury urban living.
The masterplan’s windmill-like building arrangement naturally generates multiple courtyards while creating generous distances of 30–50 metres between residential blocks. Rather than treating the landscape as a scene confined to the ground plane, the design introduces a key strategy: allowing landscape to rise vertically into architecture. With relatively low building heights, trees and planting are able to grow upward to meet the window line, extending the experience of garden living from the site into the daily lives of residents.
Forest, courtyard, and water form the project’s three primary landscape elements. Across 168 residences, view orientation was carefully calibrated by coordinating topography, planting structure, and anticipated canopy height. In this way, each residence gains its own framed relationship with greenery, while the entire site reads as a continuous ecological system that moves from ground to sky. Seasonal planting enters every window view, transforming landscape into an intimate and ever-changing presence
within domestic life.
At the arrival sequence, low eaves and enclosed spatial turns create a compact threshold that quickly opens into a woodland atmosphere. Just behind the entrance, a grove of silver birch establishes an inward, quiet mood. Flowing terrain and water are composed together as “mountains on water,” where the sense of time becomes slower, softer, and held.
A jade-like bridge threads through the woodland as both circulation spine and symbolic gesture, expressing the idea of folding nature into luxury. It draws residents through trees, stone textures, and filtered light before revealing larger garden spaces beyond. This restrained choreography creates a landscape experience where woodland, water, and architecture are interwoven rather than displayed.
Within the site, five major courtyards are conceived as distinct yet connected scenes, linked by a looping garden walk of winding paths, woodland streams, decks, and varied water conditions. Inspired by the literary and cultural traditions of Sichuan, the design extracts a quiet repertoire of regional character and translates it into contemporary spatial form. Program volumes are dispersed along the creek to blur boundaries between architecture, landscape, and interior life.
Guobin No.7 Residence redefines contemporary urban seclusion in Chengdu. It is not only a place to live, but a landscape framework that holds time, frames the seasons, and brings the emotional depth of Shu culture into everyday domestic experience.
Guobin No.7 Residence – Forest Retreat
Location: Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China
Client: Chengdu Urban Investment Zhidi Group Co., Ltd.
Client Team: Chen Weilin, Yan Xiaoxun, He Peiting
Landscape Design: Change Studio
Architectural Design: gad (gad Design)
Interior Design: Zixiange, WSD Design
Landscape Construction: Sichuan Dajia Environmental Art Engineering Co., Ltd.
Text: Change Studio
Photography: E-ar TARS
Be the first to comment