PAINT EVERY WALL grey is the latest designer statement from Beijing's master planners. City ordinances offer a choice of 48 shades of grey but spell the end to the recent brightening up of Beijing's dismal architecture. Many had begun to relish the sight, on days when the smog lifted, of buildings cheekily painted purple and pink. The Government had ordered a city-wide makeover, but left the choice of colour to the owner's discretion.
How to redecorate Beijing in order to win the 2008 Olympics bid and create a modern 'international' city, is a dilemma for a government so stridently nationalistic. It is also a sign of a new consciousness about design which is spreading through the ranks of China's growing class of homeowners.
In the past 18 months more than a dozen glossy magazines exclusively devoted to explaining interior and new advertising market have appeared on newsstands.
Even the Party Committee's newspaper, the Beijing Daily has pages devoted to the colour coordination schemes for exterior walls.
In a nation once obsessed with enforcing drab uniformity, Beijing achieved a distinctive eminence by creating a wasteland of peeling concrete apartment blocks and sprawling red-brick factories out of the once glorious splendour of imperial China.
Now the city's key newspapers devote whole sections to questions of home furnishing and interior design. Television plays its part too. There are three or four programmes a week on Beijing and national television channels all devoted to advising the uninitiated on better bathrooms and brighter living rooms.
Since the city began urging its residents to take out mortgages and buy their own apartments two years ago, the IKEA shopping center has become a shrine.
" It has had a much bigger influence than in other countries. It has really been a catalyst," says Zhang Sunli, one of the many professional interior designers to emerge in Beijing over the past two years.
Beijingers say the mass market in home fittings has not taken off the way it has in Shanghai. About 60 per cent of the commercial flats are unsold and too many government officials can still hang on to low-rent government housing.
Many of those who took the plunge and bought their own homes have been complaining of high prices, distant locations, leaking pipes, shabby construction standards and worst of all in noisy Beijing, lack of soundproofing.
Those with the money to do as they please are, like Beijing's city planners, wrestling with one key issue: how to be 'international' and at the same time 'Chinese' .
The bureaucrats have been explaining, with some truth, that grey is Beijing's traditional colour, one which suits its climate and geographical location. In the Qing dynasty all the courtyard walls were painted grey unless they belonged to the imperial city, in which case they were red and the roofs, yellow or green. Fu Bonan, chairman of the municipal administration management committee, has a more dubious argument. "Many international cities choose this colour. It gives people the impression the city is full of vigour," he claims.
Chang Yungho, from the Peking University Architectural Research Bureau, thinks the fact that design has penetrated the consciousness of Beijing's rulers is a key sign of change.
"It is the first time in decades that the city has asked people to paint their buildings, some haven't been touched in 20 or 30 years," he says. For 40 years, architectural creativity disappeared from China. New buildings were selected from a set of standard designs handed over by the Soviets.
" By the 1970s there were just two designs for apartment blocks," says Chen Ming, an avant-garde artists turned interior decorator and publisher of Colourfulness, a glossy magazine devoted to interior design. "Now people are interested in expressing their individuality through their homes, but they are not sure how to do it."
"Everything looks the same in China because it is the same," explains Zhang Xin, a mainland real estate developer whose SOHO New Town apartments caused a stir this year when they were sold.
Government planners had exact specifications for every detail of the housing, Zhang explains, each according to an individual's rank in the bureaucratic hierarchy irrespective of where they were in China.
"We found there is only one size of door-1.8 metres by 90cm-so if you want one for people who are tall, you cannot find it," she says.
Zhang and her husband Pan Shiyi are the most successful and famous residential developers in Beijing. They have independently designed and financed stylish living quarters for a mew generation of homeowners. Inside the apartments are aggressively modernistic. The split-level designs allow the residents to live and work at home.
Buyers are queued up even before completion, many of whom Zhang says belong to a new class of Beijingers-computer savvy 35 to 40-year-olds who run small businesses in the arts or media sector.
"We wanted to find an architectural answer to the way people live now," she says.
The interior design is the work of Venezuelan architect, Antonio Ochao-Piccardo, who may be the advance guard for many other international architects who will be allowed to set up practices in China, after it joins the World Trade Organisation.
"There is too much government influence on the buildings, which is a pity. Take the national customs headquarters, people say it looks like a pair of underpants," says Chen Min.
Many Beijingers also regret the excessive influence of Hong Kong investors who have replicated designs better suited to cramped sites in hilly Hong Kong, not Beijing, a city on a broad plain.
"Why did they have to introduce all these pencil towers? I am not sure that is the right thing for Beijing," complains architect Chang Yungho.
Hong Kong and Singapore developers are hoping to build more residential blocks, especially in the Central Business District in Chaoyang, the eastern district of Beijing, once home to many state-owned enterprises. Over the next 10 years it is to be transformed into Beijing's equivalent of Manhattan or Tokyo's Shinjuku, with not only offices but theatres, museums, parks, restaurants and art galleries.
SOHO New Town is one of the first such developments and was built on a site which once belonged to an old rice wine factory. Zhang Xin is planning another development when the model factory, the Beijing No 2 Machinery Plant, which employs thousands of metalworkers, moves out.
"It will be challenge for domestic architects to adapt and become creative," says Zhang Xin.
"Yet it is difficult to maintain the unique national style. Globalization now means everyone uses the same kind of materials," she adds.
Zhang and her husband say they are trying to foster innovative design by creating an architectural museum near the Great Wall at Badaling. Architects from around the world have been invited to design innovative holiday homes which blend in with the local scenery. They have experimented with converting a former peasant courtyard into a stylish country hideaway using local materials.
This lies in a village near another section of the Great Wall where a dozen of Beijing's art crowd have all done something similar. The homes of such artistic folk are now regularly featured on the pages of magazines like Colourfulness.
Something of a Beijing style is emerging. The exterior may be ash grey but the interior blends white walls, spot lighting, glass and steel fixtures with old wooden furniture, carpets or carvings and pottery salvaged from antique markets.
To go truly upmarket, designers prefer to include knowing references to more
recent local traditions. The loft, a restaurant converted from a warehouse,
received a lot of attention when it opened. Included among the chrome and perspex
furnishings were not only the customary and uncomfortable Qing-dynasty wooden
chairs but 20 television sets lined up in a row. They all showed actors dressed
in uniform Mao jackets performing one of Jiang Qing's eight revolutionary operas.
