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"View Slideshow\n\nChina is one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations, with a history dating back 5,000 years; but to visit the country today is to feel an adrenaline jolt of modernity. In cities like Beijing and Shanghai, old neighborhoods are being razed to make way for high-rises; in rural areas, highways and high-speed trains are opening up the interior and golf courses are replacing rice paddies. And everywhere Chinese consumers are rushing to acquire new cars, new clothes, new gadgets and new houses on an unprecedented scale. In the most populous, fastest-growing economy in history, where an average citizen has 10 times the purchasing power he or she had just 25 years ago and where there are now 345,000 millionaires, 4,935 \"ultrahigh-net-worth individuals\" (with assets of over $30 million) and 106 billionaires, it seems ever truer that\u2014as the former Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping used to say\u2014\"to get rich is glorious.\"\n\nThe only thing more glorious, it seems, is showing off the fact. Chinese consumers are buying ever-larger quantities of designer clothing, expensive cars, vintage wine, pricey watches and high-end art\u2014China is the third-largest market for luxury goods in the world\u2014and they want to build ever more lavish houses to put them in. Interestingly, most new owners opt for copies of Mediterranean villas or French ch\u00E2teaux and want to fill them with reproductions of English and French antiques, feeling that luxury and European tradition are synonymous; but the owners of a new house in Sichuan Province were willing to take a different approach.\n\n\"I'm really a modernist,\" says Wang Ta-Chun, a Columbia University-trained, Taiwan-based architect and designer, \"and at first this client was very conservative. But he looked at my work and we talked, and he agreed to go in a different direction.\" In fact, Wang was given carte blanche to design interiors and purchase materials, furnishings and artwork with virtually no input from the owner\u2014a situation that is the rule rather than the exception in China. \"The only nonnegotiable point was the budget,\" Wang says. \"The owner had a budget, and we had to stick to it.\"\n\nThe three-story, four-bedroom house was part of a complex of residences constructed by a developer on a new golf course near Chengdu and was planned as a weekend getaway for the owner and his family. \"They also bring guests, business clients and the like, to spend the weekend playing golf,\" says Wang. So, as is typical of much new residential construction in China, the house boasts a number of entertainment rooms\u2014a karaoke room, a spa, a formal dining room, a bar/breakfast room and a soaring, double-height living room\u2014in addition to more private spaces. There are also two kitchens\u2014one adjacent to the breakfast room and bar, and another, a closed-off \"work kitchen\" where the messy, smoky business of stir-frying, for example, can take place and not intrude on the living and entertaining areas.\n\nDespite this multiplicity of rooms and uses, the entire house feels like an exercise in a rarefied form of geometry. The marble floors in the living, dining and breakfast rooms are crisscrossed with a square rosewood grid; the living and working areas on the main level are sectioned off with rectangular wood dividers. In the living room, an austere marble fireplace\u2014a hollow rectangle\u2014is set into a marble ledge running the length of the window wall; opposite it, a perforated steel screen, sandwiched between panes of glass, is separated into tall rectangles by stainless-steel frames. Even the furnishings have a Euclidean feel: Tables are cubes or cylinders; sofas are rectangular.\n\nThe geometric effect is heightened by Wang's use of streamlined finishes throughout\u2014marble, steel, glass or cork walls and lacquer, rock composite or rosewood surfaces\u2014and by the minimalist palette he employs. The only spots of color laid against the living room's white-and-mauve background are a persimmon-colored sofa, a few persimmon pillows and a painting above the fireplace in shades of red and gold. In the beige-and-brown breakfast room, the color comes from an unexpected glass chandelier that looks like a cluster of coral and from a trio of gourds of the same hue nestled on a round lacquered table. The master bedroom\u2014a serene oasis of gray and mauve\u2014is accented by a silk throw in crimson, pink and gold. Even the child's bedroom is a cool statement in shades of gray, enlivened only by a fabric throw in broad stripes of silver, eggplant and gold.\n\nIn this house, luxury speaks in a hushed voice, expressing itself in space and volume rather than through overt signs of opulence. In a few places, it seems, Wang has made a gesture or two in the direction of his client's traditional tastes: The dining room features a crystal chandelier\u2014a recidivist indulgence the owner purchased in Shanghai\u2014and in the same room, the set of steel-legged chairs, covered in a black-and-white Florentine print, ironically reference Louis XVI. There are also a few grace notes\u2014like the touches of crimson and gold and the use of lacquer finishes and sliding screens\u2014that allude to classical Chinese style.\n\nBut for the most part the rooms are devoid of the kind of personal touches that American and European designers take pains to incorporate. This is no accident. For in China today, Wang points out, most clients don't have preexisting collections of art or objects or furniture. And in a country so focused on the future, they're not interested in fetishizing the past. So when a new house is completed, the owner sheds his old residence like the skin of a snake and moves into his new one with just the designer clothes in his (Vuitton) suitcase. He may be part of an old civilization, but he lives in a brave new world."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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