In Dazhangxi there’s the Isle of Carp
Its shape is like a carp on satellite images
Lots of back-to-countryside young people gather here
We huddle together
Many people from metropolises like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen like staying in Songkou for a few days
My name is Shi Haonan
I’m a rural architect now
I got a master degree from Peking University
At the beginning
Fang Ling and I were in the same design institute
She came here in 2014
In early 2016
I came here too
I’m a post-90s and I’ve been in Songkou for 7 years
Songkou Town is the backyard of Fuzhou
Songkouqi Inn was the workplace of a neighborhood committee
I run it with some of my college roommates
What rural areas attract me the most are the nature and folk custom
We want to offer our son such an atmosphere
Then we renovated the Sunset Residence
With a bunch of back-to-countryside young people
It covers an area of more than 700 mw
It’s an old house built in the Qing Dynasty
It’s next to ‘Bakuicuo’
Which was a protective place against Japanese pirates and bandits
There was only a wooden frame left when we accepted the project
We kept its clean and elegant shape
We remade the ceiling
There’re 4 guestrooms in total
You can see beautiful walls with tile nails
Because the old house’s ceiling was not high enough
We adopted tatami in the bedroom
We made windows for gorgeous views
And the length, thickness and separation of the gratings’ bars
They were designed based on the angle of the sun
During the hottest two months in summer
From 3:00pm to 5:00 pm
The sun stays out of the house
We’ve also designed some separable decorative boxes
They can be piled up to decorate the walls
Sometimes we also use them in the camping zone
We have various types of stone in the yard
Such as cobblestone and dark stone
We invited two stone masters
They might be called craftsmen if they were in Japan
They spent nearly two weeks making the cambered wall
The stone house took nearly 15 days
Every visitor is amazed to see it
Hairong, one of our partners
She’s not communicative
But she likes farming
So we give her a big garden
And Yuming was a sailor
He was on the sea for 4 years
And he found it was hard for him to adapt to such life at sea
So he renovated his old house into a guesthouse
Now we shuttle back and forth between the city and the countryside
During school days
One of us stays in the city to take care of him
And in holidays and vacations we live in the village
We’ve designed a pond under the chestnut tree
He can play with sand there
We came to the countryside in our 20s and we’ve been staying here for five or six years
We haven’t earned much money
But we’ve gained a lot
No matter what you do
You can learn by a process of trial and error
Many people say such life is what they’ve been dreaming of