Fast-disappearing, Shanghai’s nong tang (lane houses) combine European construction with Chinese notions of tightly packed residential life. From the street, these early-20th-century buildings present gabled facades — respectable and a bit staid. But once you walk through the door to the lane running between the houses, you encounter a messy world of clothes hanging out to dry, shutters flung open, people gossiping, and kids running around. Private space bleeds into the public realm, with some folks cooking in the shared lane and others bathing their children there.
Neri & Hu Design and Research Office (NHDRO) tried to capture the spirit of a nong tang in its design of the Waterhouse at South Bund, a trio of industrial buildings from the early 1930s converted into a 19-room boutique hotel. Blending old and new, Western and local, the firm turned a nong tang on end. “We wanted to create a vertical lane house,” states Lyndon Neri, who founded the Shanghai-based firm with his wife, Rossana Hu, in 2004. So instead of a series of public-blurring-into-private spaces that unfolds as you walk down an alley, the hotel reveals itself through a number of vertical cuts offering views down and up from guest rooms into public spaces (and vice versa).
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