GOLDEN YEARS
PROJECTS
Five storeys up in Shanghai, this villa designed by Chris Shao Studio takes its cue from an old Chinese idiom, Jinse Huannian, words that hold golden eras and cherished years in the same breath, memory sitting close to nostalgia without quite becoming it. The building announces its own contradiction before the door is reached: a red brick facade, when traditional Shanghai brick under nineteenth century European influence ran blue. That red has since become a visual signature of the city, and here it reads as a quiet nod to Shanghai's own restless push toward modernity.
Inside, the collision continues room by room. Victorian decorative plasterwork and Art Nouveau detailing sit embedded in the interior like inherited treasure, layered against western art movements collaged in a distinctly contemporary hand.
A marbled panel, its surface fluted and richly veined in rust and cream, anchors one sitting room like a piece of geology brought indoors, while curved brown velvet sofas and low bronze tables keep the mood grounded rather than ornamental.
Elsewhere, a hand painted mural in blue and white runs the height of a wall, trees and river bridges rendered in the manner of an old toile, giving an otherwise pared back room its own sense of inherited memory.
Furniture throughout leans handcrafted and specific: dining chairs finished in fringed silk with mother of pearl buttons, a writing desk carrying an antique typewriter beneath a coffered, wallpapered ceiling, a display cabinet of glass and aged mirror holding porcelain, silver, and fragments of classical sculpture side by side.
Nothing here is styled to be looked at once. Each room is built for return visits, the kind of detail that reveals itself slowly rather than all at once.
The result is eclectic without losing its discipline, an interior that treats East and West, old and new, as material to be worked rather than opposites to be resolved. Chris Shao Studio has approached the villa as a collaboration across generations, working with contemporary artists and designers so that what stands today has room to be reinterpreted by the not yet old and the not yet born.
