Her teahouse taps into a growing trend: China’s new appreciation for modern interior design. For the most part, the interest comes from mainland Chinese who’ve been exposed to Western thinking and expat Westerners. But their refined taste–and standards of quality–are beginning to catch on among other middle-class Chinese. “There are more projects than interior designers can handle,” says Briton Adam Robarts, of the cutting-edge Beijing design firm Robarts Interiors. “China is the land of the future.”
For a long time it seemed as if mainland tastes would never escape the past. As recently as five years ago, Chinese homes and shops were often a nightmare of kitsch. Having abandoned the drab socialist trappings of Mao Zedong’s era, urban Chinese splurged on overstuffed sofas, cheap Picasso imitations and mismatched lighting fixtures. Now avant-garde designers are transforming the urban landscape. Last year painter Chen Yifei opened a top-quality housewares shop in Shanghai that sells embroidered tablecloths and porcelain from former Chinese imperial kilns.
Robarts got in on the ground floor of the boom. In 1993, he took a sabbatical from his Manchester studio to teach at Sichuan’s Chongqing University. He quickly saw a unique opportunity: fusing Western design concepts of timelessness and simplicity with Chinese culture. So Robarts and his wife, Karen, moved to Beijing, and in 1997 opened a design studio that now has 20 employees. Their corporate clients include top Chinese firms as well as Western companies such as Ericsson and BASF.
Fashionable design doesn’t come cheap. At Zhang’s teahouse, a pot of Purple Cloud tea costs about $21, and a meal for two can run $100. Zhang knows it wasn’t until the late ’90s that she could count on customers willing to pay for such surroundings. Now there’s no going back to fake Picassos.
