Going All Kevin McCloud!

There's a building up in Dafen that we've talked about in here many times:

A Dafen Art Gallery.

This is the Qing Dynasty Courtyard House that was most successfully and beautifully restored.

On our first Dafen-Drop-By, when Margaret and I first laid eyes the place, for me it was truly a knuckle-biting epiphany and going through the building I fell in love. You're forbidden to take photos that include the paintings, so you just have to imagine the interior; two floors of cool white gallery rooms with perfect flow-through from space to space, and all exquisitely carved dark wood window panels and strong thick dark wood floorboards, and, first visit, three entire wings full of the most unimaginably beautiful paintings of mist over white waterlilies. All up, the entirety was so exactly right this instantly became my dream house; the blueprint for the home where I want to live out the rest of my days.

I was so enamored, everyone I've taken to Dafen since I've excitedly shuffled round to see it for themselves, and you may recall how Kelly A., on seeing it the second time, said "Oh my god, it does exist. It's so incredible and surreal, I thought I'd dreamed it."

And it's so great they have several lovely resident English speakers on the premises who are proud to talk architecture, and a particularly knowledgeable one explained what they'd done: how, a decade earlier, they'd bought the derelict building and totally rebuilt it so it looked exactly the same, leaving only the back part in the original state:

Through that door is a dining room, 

a sleeping loft running the length of the wing,

and a large, modern kitchen.

And all the various wings were centered around a courtyard which they'd pretty well left alone as well:

 

Courtyard and a lovely gentleman from Beijing. 

We both individually partook of the gallery's 

afternoon tea ceremony, became friends, 

and sat there for ages

chatting about the Qing Dynasty.

However, what's now happening is that the gallery is so successful they've begun buying up the surrounding Qing Dynasty Courtyard Houses as well:

The Qing buildings around the side 

of our wonderful gallery.

To me, this should have been bliss; that nothing should have been more wonderful than having these visually-gifted folk buy the other Qing buildings to restore them as well. 

And now it's happening.

But ...

"Mmmm, wonder what Kevin McCloud would say about this."  I muttered last week. And then I tried to imagine.

I wasn't allowed to photograph the latest however they did permit me to take this carefully placed photo of Kiwi Heather:

See behind her head, the door 

linking the original space to the new?

They've cut a doorway through the side of their building that leads into a night-club-looking enormous room that's ... no, not weird as such ... rather it's all " Hmmph! ARCHITECTURE!!!" as that old cowboy said looking at some new post-modern building in Santa Fe!

However some things they got sorta right, like this piece of glass in the ceiling that shows the old roof design:

And I love the new hallway linking one building to the next building along the row:

Again with the sneaky photographing.

And I LOVE the new back door to the place:

But ...

OK, I know I'm an opinionated git who always knows how she feels about everything, but, alas, not here. There are just so many mmmms! I kept thinking how much I'd love to see a Grand Designs episode on the place; to have Kevin McCloud go through and analyse it all.

Like this:

It's immediately below the skylight I've shown you above, and ... well, it's a single wall from the old Qing house that was originally on the site, and it immediately struck me as wrong. 

So there I was madly channeling "my inner Kevin McCloud" and asking myself why it was wrong - maybe something like, "too much New York sensibility thrust into Qing" - when Heather said "There is something mildly offensive about extracting something from reality and turning it into Art. That was once a house where people were born, lived and died, and now it's appropriated as a random piece of sculpture." and I realised that when Heather was right she was sooo right and it wasn't the architecture I was really having these odd thoughts about, but rather ... gosh, what?  The Morality?

But nonetheless, this moral issue aside, it's still a gorgeous restoration. Kinda!

But ...

Yes, I know it isn't yet finished and maybe they have something "totally tah-dah" and "final filip" to round it all off, but to me it doesn't really gel with the sheer perfection of what previously existed and I'm not sure what I think.

Gosh, I would so LOVE Kevin McCloud to go through the place and give us all his Grand Design thoughts on the subject.