Modum Atelier Grafts a Glass and Timber Pavilion onto a Qing Dynasty Qilou to Make a Zhongshan Café

Minzu Road is one of those Zhongshan streets where the city's history sits right on the surface: weathered brick, clay tile eaves and shopfronts that have changed tenants many times while the buildings stayed put. Modum Atelier, led by Zhou Ruizhe and Yang Kunbo, has turned one of these buildings into Minzu Lane Coffee. The host is a traditional qilou dating from the Jiaqing period of the Qing Dynasty, a long, narrow structure of brick masonry walls and a timber frame. The new café occupies just 77 m².

What interests us is how little the project tries to prove. The studio calls it an incremental renewal, and the work reads that way. The original firewalls stay, the timber frame stays, and the new elements arrive as distinct, legible insertions. A glass and timber box projects from the upper floor, a dark stair threads through the section, and a steel and timber canopy hovers in one room. The building is not restored to a frozen past or overwritten by a new identity. It is adjusted, carefully, so that it can serve coffee and rejoin the street it has stood on for two centuries.

A Thin Slice of an Old Street

The aerial views make the urban situation clear. The café is a narrow sliver wedged between older brick houses, with low rooftops in the foreground and towers on the horizon. That contrast between old and new Zhongshan is the context the studio is working against, and the decision to keep the qilou's grey brick gable intact is the first statement of intent.

The building does not try to outgrow its neighbors. Its height, roofline and gable stay in step with the row, so the intervention registers at the scale of the street rather than the skyline. On a street described as layered with urban memory, that restraint is the right call.

The Facade as a Hinge

The defining move on the street is the projecting box on the upper floor. Framed in timber and glazed, it pushes forward from the old facade like a small pavilion, which explains the project's alternate title, "Old Qilou, New Pavilion". At dusk it becomes a lantern, the brightest object on the block, and it tells passersby that something has changed inside without disturbing the old masonry around it.

At ground level the white columns of the qilou frontage remain, and the shopfront is rebuilt with a plywood-framed window and a glazed entrance. A potted tree sits just inside the glass, softening the threshold. The ground floor feels more open than the original typology would suggest, which matters for a café that depends on people seeing in and wandering through.

Eaves, Brick and the Round Window

The corner details are where the old and the new are closest. A clay tile eave sits directly above a round window, and a weathered brick column frames both. The round opening is a familiar device in southern Chinese architecture, but here it does a specific job: it gives the upper seating nook a framed view out and gives the street a single glowing point at night.

Inside, the same window anchors a small upstairs corner with an exposed clay tile ceiling and dark plank floor. The roof tiles stay visible from below, so you are always aware of the building's original fabric even while sitting in a new room.

Counter, Stair and Old Joists

The long, narrow plan is the qilou's inheritance and the café's main operational challenge. Modum Atelier lines the ground floor with a long counter, places the espresso machine beneath exposed log joists, and runs a blackened timber stair along one wall. Service, circulation and seating all have to share the same slim volume, and the plan resolves them in a single linear sequence from the street window toward a lit doorway at the back.

The material palette is tight: a steel-topped counter, dark timber, pale stools and the original rafters overhead. Nothing competes with the old structure. The new pieces are darker or harder than the existing timber, so the eye can easily separate what was there from what was added.

Steel and Timber Insertions

Two elements show the studio's method most clearly. The suspended steel and timber canopy lowers the ceiling in a plaster-walled room, creating a more intimate zone without touching the grey brick wall beside it. The stair balustrade combines dark timber with slender steel rods, light enough to let views pass between floors.

Both read as furniture-scale additions placed inside the old shell rather than structural interventions into it. This is what incremental renewal looks like in practice: changes that could, in principle, be removed again, leaving the qilou largely as it was found.

Seating Along the Whitewashed Wall

The seating areas are the quietest part of the project. Low timber benches with canvas cushions line a whitewashed brick wall, small metal shelves hang above them, and terracotta-tiled rafters run overhead. Painting the brick white keeps the masonry texture while brightening a deep plan that receives daylight mainly from its ends.

The benches hug the wall to leave the narrow floor clear, a practical response to the plan's proportions. The result is calm and slightly domestic, closer to sitting in someone's front room than in a branded café.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings confirm what the photographs suggest. The exploded axonometric separates the roof, front balcony and side volume from the main body, which makes the logic of the additions easy to read. The ground floor plan shows thick masonry walls around a narrow footprint with the counter and stair tucked along its length, and the second floor ends in an angled glazed bay.

The sections are the most revealing set. The long section stacks three levels under a pitched roof with the sloped canopy in place, and the cross section shows the stair floating along one wall to save floor width. A separate section through the small volume shows the sloped roof, track lighting, round window and door, essentially the pavilion drawn on its own.

Why This Project Matters

Chinese cities are full of historic buildings like this one: too small for major redevelopment, too old to ignore, often caught between demolition and a superficial heritage makeover. Minzu Lane Coffee offers a third path. It keeps the brick firewalls and timber frame, adds a small number of clearly modern elements, and gives the building a commercial use that brings people back to the street. At 77 m², it shows that renewal can happen one plot at a time.

It also fits the stated position of Modum Atelier, founded in 2021 with offices in Nanjing and Chengdu, which treats tradition as raw material rather than as a style to imitate. The glowing pavilion on the facade is the image people will remember, but the real lesson sits inside: a disciplined set of additions that respects the qilou's structure while making it useful again.

Minzu Lane Coffee by Modum Atelier (lead architects Zhou Ruizhe and Yang Kunbo; design team Zhou Ruizhe, Yang Kunbo, Zhang Siyi and Bao Jiahui), Zhongshan, China. Area: 77 m². Completed: 2025. Photography: Guowei Liu.

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