BDSD Boundless Design Weaves a Wildness Promenade Through a 1951 Wine Factory in Huizhou

The Dongjiang Wine Factory was built in 1951 on a peninsula where Huizhou's old and new city districts meet. Seventy years later, the compound's 18 building groups still stand along the riverbank, their brick walls, concrete frames, and industrial chimney forming a dense, low-rise cluster that reads like a geological cross-section of mid-century Chinese manufacturing. BDSD Boundless Design was tasked not with razing this fabric but with making it inhabitable again, threading a continuous public promenade through structures that were never designed for pedestrian pleasure.

What makes the Wildness Promenade worth studying is the discipline of its restraint. Situated in Zone C of the broader Wild Island Cultural and Life Community, which has been undergoing renewal since 2019, the project completed in 2024 operates on a principle the studio calls "a growing living block." Demolition is treated as a last resort. Instead, the architects reorganized circulation patterns, introduced lightweight steel and concrete interventions, and allowed existing vegetation to grow freely. The result is not a polished heritage park but something rougher and more honest: an architecture of repair where the old chimney, the weathered columns, and the overgrown canopy are given as much design authority as anything the architects drew.

Repair Over Replacement

BDSD's central argument is legible in every joint where new meets old. Preserved brick doorways are framed by white columns and vertical metal louvres rather than sealed behind glass. Weathered arches remain exposed, their surfaces hosting climbing vegetation that softens the boundary between ruin and renovation. The approach avoids the common adaptive reuse trap of treating heritage fabric as scenography. These walls still carry loads, still define rooms, still organize sight lines.

The material palette for new insertions is deliberately austere: steel, concrete, corrugated metal, and glass block. Nothing competes with the patina of the original brick and timber. Where a lesser project might have sandblasted the old surfaces to a uniform finish, here the grime, the cracks, and the uneven mortar joints remain. The contrast between geometric new handrails and crumbling masonry is not accidental; it is the entire design thesis.

Vertical Stitching

The factory buildings were horizontal creatures, organized for the movement of goods on a single level. Turning them into a public promenade required a fundamentally different kind of connectivity: vertical. BDSD introduced external steel staircases, glass block stair towers, and concrete ramps that carry visitors up to second-floor terraces and rooftop platforms. These additions are deliberately expressed as separate objects, bolted onto or slipped between existing volumes so the original structural logic remains readable.

The metal mesh railings and open-tread stairs keep sightlines intact while climbing. You are never enclosed; you are always aware of the courtyard below, the chimney on the horizon, the tree canopy at eye level. It is a strategy that makes the second floor of formerly inaccessible warehouses feel like a continuation of the ground-level public realm rather than a private upper story.

The Stepped Plaza as Social Infrastructure

At the heart of the compound, a broad concrete plaza steps down in generous treads, terminating at a view of the old brick chimney positioned on the visual axis. The move is simple but effective. On a weekday, these steps are a shortcut, a place to sit with coffee, a ramp for a kid on a scooter. During holidays and community celebrations, they become an amphitheater. The dual function is embedded in the geometry: risers wide enough for seating, landings deep enough for performance.

Thin metal handrails subdivide the stairscape without enclosing it. Overhanging tree branches filter the southern sun. The stepped section negotiates a genuine grade change across the site, which means it is solving an infrastructure problem while simultaneously producing the compound's most generous public space. That kind of economy is worth noting in a field that too often treats landscape and circulation as separate budget lines.

Courtyards and Planted Rooms

Between the factory buildings, a series of courtyards emerge, each with a distinct character defined by the structures that bound it. One features a translucent glass block stair tower rising beside a weathered concrete column and a planted bed. Another pairs white metal colonnades with cantilevered upper stories, creating a shaded ground-floor zone that feels almost Mediterranean in section. A third is more intimate, with concrete seating walls, preserved tree trunks, and low planting that blurs into the existing facades.

The decision to preserve original tall plants rather than clear-cut and replant is what gives these spaces their uncanny maturity. Most adaptive reuse projects look painfully new for the first decade. Here the canopy is already established, the roots already tangled into the foundations, the shade already deep. Nature was the first designer on this site, and BDSD had the intelligence to keep it on the team.

Wild Gardens and Controlled Disorder

The "wildness" in the project's name is not metaphorical. Narrow pathways thread between planted beds where vegetation is encouraged to grow freely, brushing against preserved tree trunks and spilling over low walls. Linear walkways flanked by exposed brick ruins and mature trees feel less like designed landscapes and more like trails through a ruin reclaimed by forest. The disorder of nature collides with the geometric precision of new concrete terraces and metal railings, and neither wins. That tension is the project's atmosphere.

There is a real risk in this strategy. Unmanaged planting can quickly tip from charming to neglected. But the presence of clear circulation spines, the quality of the steel detailing, and the evident care in the stone paving suggest that BDSD has calibrated the wildness carefully. This is not abandonment masquerading as design; it is a landscape framework that trusts time to fill in the blanks.

Layered Facades and Rooftop Life

The most visually striking moments occur where new volumes sit atop old walls. Glazed boxes perch on weathered brick facades, shaded by vertical metal screens. Corrugated metal panels, exposed timber beams, and rooftop planters compose layered elevations that read like stratigraphic sections: each era of construction visible, none concealed. External steel staircases with mesh railings connect these upper volumes, creating an elevated circuit that doubles as a second public promenade above the ground-floor courtyards.

The aerial views at golden hour reveal the cumulative effect: a constellation of rooftop terraces overlooking the Dongjiang River, their corrugated and planted surfaces catching the low light. It is an image that makes the case for adaptive reuse more persuasively than any sustainability metric. The old factory was a closed, productive machine. The new promenade is an open, social landscape that happens to occupy the same footprint.

The River and the Peninsula

Huizhou's Qiaodong Peninsula sits at the meeting point of old and new city districts, and the compound's relationship to the Dongjiang River is crucial to understanding its urban role. The aerial view at golden hour shows the clustered volumes stepping toward the water, their rooftop terraces oriented to catch river breezes and sunset views. At ground level, covered passages with exposed concrete beams and dappled light from overhead foliage create a microclimate that is cooler and quieter than the streets beyond.

The site is not an island. It is embedded in dense residential fabric, and the promenade's success depends on its porosity, its willingness to let the city flow through. The multiple entry points, the absence of gates, and the continuous ground-level circulation all reinforce this. BDSD has designed a public space that belongs to the neighborhood, not a heritage attraction that charges admission.

Plans and Drawings

The site plans reveal the compound's angular footprint wedged among surrounding structures and the Dongjiang riverbank. Circulation diagrams trace pedestrian and vehicle paths weaving through the cluster with a legibility that the built experience deliberately subverts: on paper, the routes are clear; in person, discovery is the point. The elevations and sections show how terraced volumes, central vertical cores, and exterior stairs generate a continuously inhabited section across multiple levels. The red-highlighted aerial plan locates the intervention within the broader urban block, confirming just how tightly this project is threaded into its surroundings.

Why This Project Matters

Adaptive reuse has become the default aspiration for disused industrial sites across China, but results vary wildly. Too many projects hollow out the heritage and fill it with commercial programming that could exist anywhere. The Wildness Promenade succeeds because it treats the existing fabric as a design partner rather than a constraint. The 1951 wine factory's brick walls, concrete frames, and mature trees are not obstacles to be worked around; they are the spatial raw material from which the promenade is made. BDSD Boundless Design's micro-scale interventions, lightweight steel connections, and stepped plazas add just enough new structure to transform circulation without erasing character.

The project also offers a model for how public space can be produced incrementally. The broader Wild Island site has been evolving since 2019, and the "growing living block" principle suggests that the design is not a fixed endpoint but a framework for ongoing adaptation. In a profession still addicted to the reveal, to the single dramatic gesture, there is something quietly radical about a project that defines its success by how well it absorbs future change. The wildness is the point: not everything needs to be designed, and not everything needs to be finished.

Wildness Promenade by BDSD Boundless Design, located in Huizhou, China. Part of the Wild Island Cultural and Life Community on the Qiaodong Peninsula along the Dongjiang River. Completed 2024. Adaptive reuse of the former Dongjiang Wine Factory, originally built in 1951.

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