Contemporary housing design in China usually follows a standard real-estate formula to reduce the developer's marketing risk as much as possible.

For most of the past decade, the architecture firm Urbanus has been slowly transforming one of Shenzhen's first factory complexes into a lively, mixed-use district catering to the needs of start-up companies and creative professionals.

“Graceful” is not a word often used to describe  the business of development, especially in China, where cities move forward at sometimes ruinous speeds.

“Every city is looking for a facelift”,  states Wang Hui, a principal of Urbanus Architects, while talking about his firm’s OCT Art & Design Gallery in Shenzhen.

Urbanus, an architecture and design firm with offices in Shenzhen and Beijing, first made a name for itself designing public open spaces; some of its earliest commissions in the late 1990s were for squares, plazas and parks, mostly in Shenzhen.

With thousands of artists in the area busily forging famous (and obscure) paintings, Dafen is an intriguing place for an art museum. A “village” within the city of Shenzhen, it features streets and alleys packed with studios producing counterfeit paintings, many of which are bought to decorate hotel rooms in the United States and elsewhere.