Juanzong Apartment

Juanzong Apartment, designed by genarchitects, aims to offer friendly and functional living spaces for both residents and visitors.

Youyi Bay

Youyi Bay, a small community comprised of a group of buildings and several plazas, is situated at the southern entrance of the ‘Aranya North Shore Community’ in Qinhuangdao.

It serves as the central hub for public activities in the southern part of the entire North Shore community.

As the nearest coastal resort to Beijing, Qinhuangdao is a highly popular tourist destination.

The Aranya community has long been renowned for hosting various cultural and artistic events, attracting many families, freelancers, and artists to reside and create here.

We aim to create a vibrant, mixed-use neighborhood at Youyi Bay, serving both the community and visitors, through a blend of functions and spatial planning, offering a pleasant scale and intimate atmosphere.

While continuing the planning pattern of the enclosed street block in the North Shore, we are also exploring a more public-oriented community space.

The building complex of Youyi Bay breaks the grid order of the surrounding area, reduces the volume of buildings.

The hotel with a U-shaped plan and the apartment with an L-shaped plan are arranged diagonally, enclosing two trapezoidal squares and a triangular courtyard together with surrounding buildings.

Retail arcade is set on the ground floor of the apartments.

The different scales of squares and courtyards enrich the hierarchical public nature of the outdoor spaces at Youyi Bay.

The orientations of hotel and apartment rooms are divided into internal and external, providing residents with more choices.

The diagonally connected squares connect the pedestrian roads of the north and south zones, and people can enter the triangular courtyard from all directions through the buildings.

The square enclosed by the hotel, apartments, and The chapel of music is the core of public life in the southern zone.

The hotel’s facade facing the square is recessed, adding a sense of enclosure to the square, aiming to leave people with a friendly impression.

Juanzong Apartment

As a coastal resort community, residents here often come with several families of relatives and friends, and a considerable number of them are freelancers or digital nomads who want to work and live for a while in a scenic seaside community.

The ground floor of Juanzong Apartment is reserved for a diverse range of businesses, including a restaurant, a bakery, a buyer’s store, a shoe store, a handmade fabric store, a tea house and a children’s bookstore, as well as a pop-up store located on the corner.

This pop-up store, resembling a small showroom, can be rented to different vendors based on various holidays and community events.

The triangular backyard features a raised pool area, doubling as an outdoor stage for hosting various activities and gatherings during winter.

The apartment has a large living room that can be defined as a “studio”, with a width of 8 meters and a height of 4.5 meters, equipped with a balcony, an open kitchen and a dining table.

Sofas and bookshelves surround the lounge area, and there is an extra-long corner workspace by the window.

It is not only suitable for weekday art-making activities such as literature, painting and music, but can also accommodate weekend and festival salons.

The ceiling of the living room is exposed fair-faced concrete, which we painted with a thin layer of white topcoat without applying putty, thus preserving the hard texture of the concrete.

The concrete slab extends outside to form a balcony, giving order to the interior space on the facade.

Each unit’s living room faces the square, while the bedrooms face the inner courtyard, offering different views on both sides.

Between the living room and bedroom lies a 2.4-meter-wide foyer, serving as both an entrance space and a transition zone between the active and quiet areas.

The bedrooms in each unit have a ceiling height of 3 meters, differing by 1.5 meters from the living room height.

This height difference is utilized to integrate three unit types together, creating a unique one-unit-per-floor entrance experience.

We aim to give the apartment a simple and modern image, opting for light green precast terrazzo panels with green mineral as the primary aggregate for the façade material.

Terrazzo is a versatile material that requires repeated experimentation with the size, type, and color of aggregates to achieve optimal visual effects at various viewing distances.