Walking through the coffee plantations in Nujiang Grand Canyon, the wonderful aroma of coffee flowers brings joy. The call of "huke huke" white-browed monkeys echoes through the of Gaoligong Mountain...
-- Han Yang

Location: China's first coffee village. In October 2021, an invitation arrived like a beam of light during those moments of confusion. We arrived at the top of Gaoligong Mountain in Baoshan, China's highest quality coffee-growing region, invited to design a coffee manor that belonged to China and Yunnan.

Down the mountain, the original Dai ethnic settlement had been lost. The owner decided to build a Dai-style building complex, but after hasty construction by local workers, the frames and roofs were left half-finished like a mischievous child's abandoned project on the mountain slope.

Originally scheduled to take a week to measure, it took two people 15 days. The original buildings were haphazard and there was no modeling for 15 days. During this special period of investment and construction, it was more like struggling through the fog. A team of people needed to push forward with high spirits.

Together with the owner, we sorted out the building relationships, adjusted the viewing distance, traffic routes, reinforced and refined the buildings, planned each functional plane, and even drank and wrote poems in a hearty and exhilarating manner. During this time, creating a coffee manor in Yunnan that was both云南的 and world-class became the reason for everyone's willingness to invest their efforts.

Designers often stand at an altitude of 1280 meters on the Gaoligong Mountain slope, facing the magnificence and beauty of nature. At the coffee-scented construction site every day, they deeply feel the natural gifts and the owner's intentions. The belief in creating "the most meaningful coffee manor in China" has become firmly established.

From the origin of coffee to the current and future planning of China's small-bean coffee, from agriculture to secondary and tertiary industries, to trends in C-end markets, the entire design plan has been repeatedly revised in the process of positioning and adjustment.

The international nature of coffee and the local nature of Yunnan small-bean coffee have determined the ethnic internationalization positioning of this project. And today, two years later, market feedback on Yunnan small-bean coffee has also confirmed the consistent positioning of the owner and us.

Life with coffee is fast-paced, relaxed, and full of interesting experiences. The joy that comes from the space between squares is the implicit connection between spatial language and the aroma of coffee. The abundant and precious wildlife resources of Gaoligong Mountain and the integration of local Dai people's decades of farming and living experience into coffee cultivation have also provided rich performance materials for the project, making it unique in its experience and scenario.

A large amount of local old housing wood was applied on site. Designers used traditional Yunnan Dai folk dry-type building wood construction techniques as the creative foundation to innovatively solve the problem of load bearing, while combining function with artistic aesthetics to create a seamless connection.

The randomness of folk old wood makes selecting materials and processing color differences more difficult than imagined, but it also brings invaluable spatial expressions to the project. In this project, the echoes of local art are subtle yet evident, like the aroma of coffee, bringing joy and leaving memories.