As China's Parliament meets to amend the communist country's constitution to protect private property rights, China's newly rich are abandoning apartments in communal blocks and moving into trendy duplex apartments and suburban villas.
With banks ready to offer 70 percent low-interest credit on new housing developments across big Chinese cities, many of the country's 200 million urbanites are taking out mortgages and buying themselves new homes.
The unprecedented housing boom is propelling the country's record-breaking economic growth and making China an El Dorado for architects. Soon, Beijing -- the showcase of this construction boom in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games -- would display architectural works by some of the world's most well-known architects like Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Riken Yamamoto and others.
Meanwhile, since anything foreign has a cachet, Chinese architects are filling the cities with residential developments with flashy names like Palm Springs, Upper East Side, Chateau Regalia, and Merlin Champagne Town.
Many of these projects feature walled compounds with 24-hour guards that offer luxurious clubhouses, golf courses, swimming pools, tennis courts and mansions with double garages and tiny rooms for the new class of live-in domestic workers.
"People are coming in off the streets to buy apartments at Jianwai Soho complex and just offering us suitcases full of cash. It's crazy," says Antonio Ochao-Piccardo, chief architect of a new high-rise development in downtown Beijing undertaken by one of the country's most successful residential developers, Soho China Ltd.
Jianwai Soho is all avant-garde minimalist with floor-to-ceiling luminous glass walls, and the average flat goes for $300,000. The complex, with its narrow winding lanes and grass-lined walkways, is modelled on Beijing's old 'hutong' but defies the city's traditional north-south axis of house orientation by positioning all buildings 30 degree eastward and flooding them with light.
"More than 90 percent of our buyers are Chinese," says Zhang Xin, chief executive of Soho China. "About half of them come from places outside Beijing. Now that so many can afford it, they all want to secure a home in the capital."
Zhang Xin, who studied economics at Cambridge University in Britain, won a special prize, the Silver Lion, for her role as a "patron of architecture" at the 2002 architectural Biennale in Venice.
SOHO China's most daring architectural project, is a collection of holiday homes, all individually designed by 12 leading Asian architects and located just a stone's throw from the Great Wall.
Named the 'Commune by the Great Wall', its staff are dressed in Maoist-style uniforms with badges that evoke the fervour of the tumultuous Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Architecturally, developers have chosen an impressive combination of ultramodern design and Zen-style blending with surrounding nature -- a definite catch for trend-conscious property buyers.
China's new rich are asked to put down a minimum of 500,000 dollars for a weekend retreat like Ochao-Piccardo's eye-catching brick red Cantilever House, which looks out over a valley. Inside are spacious light-filled interiors and the roof smarts a garden, jacuzzi and barbeque area.
While the Commune, and the whole concept of a holiday home, is still testing the appeal of rustic retreats for China's new rich, Soho China's developments downtown are already being cited as a story of ultimate commercial success.
Indeed, Soho China's arrival on the mainland's property market seven years ago was nothing less than revolutionary. For the first time in China, where dwellings were handed over to residents as concrete shells, property developers offered ready-to-move in flats with equipped kitchens, painted walls and bathroom fittings.
Now, a score of developers across Beijing are trying to replicate the recipe of success pioneered by Soho China.
Merlin Champagne Town, a suburban development by the Merlin Chinta Development Group, tries to blend sleek minimalist designs with suburban comforts by offering smart duplex apartments with private gardens and rooftop balconies.
"Not everybody can afford to buy a suburban villa," says Liu Li, a property consultant at Merlin Town, "but many want to have the space and scenery of the suburbs. We try to cater to exactly this type of customers".
The housing boom is helped by a revolution in modern design and ironically, by nostalgia for the serenity of lost nature. True, the opening of the Swedish home furnishings giant Ikea store in Beijing seven years ago attracted vast crowds, and Ikea still ranks as one of the biggest influences on popular taste.
Yet according to Rebecca Xsu, owner of the Cottage, an interior design shop, the latest trend in Beijing is a desire to get back to nature and one's roots.
"There are too many concrete blocks around, too much steel and concrete, so people are looking for an escape. In the past, they all lived very close to nature and the earth - look at our courtyard houses," she explains to IPS. "Courtyards had earthen floors and were open to the sky, so both designers and developers want to reflect that."
