HATCH Architects Wraps a Zero-Carbon Teahouse in Photovoltaic Skin Above a Fujian Tea Village

The township of Xiadang, tucked into the mountains of Shouning County in Fujian Province, was once one of China's poorest. Its fortunes have shifted through ecotourism and a revived high-mountain tea industry, but the architecture of that transformation has, until now, remained conventional. HATCH Architects, led by David Wei, placed something genuinely radical into this context: a 467-square-meter teahouse whose entire envelope is clad in Building Integrated Photovoltaics, generating roughly 55,000 kWh of electricity annually while cutting CO₂ emissions by nearly 55 tons. The building is a prototype for what China's "dual-carbon" agenda could look like at the scale of a single village structure.

What makes the project interesting is not the carbon math alone. It is the decision to make a zero-carbon building that is also wildly expressive. The plan is derived from a Möbius strip, producing a looping, three-lobed form that spirals visitors upward from a ground-floor tea bar through a cultural exchange area to a panoramic rooftop terrace. Ultra-clear glass and Ultra-High-Performance Concrete give the shell its taut, luminous character. Against the dark-tiled roofs and rammed-earth walls of Xiadang, the teahouse reads as an alien landing, but one that gradually earns its place through generosity: its glass walls pull the village landscape inside, and its rooftop offers the best mountain views in town.

An Object in a Valley

From the air, the teahouse registers as a white, curving organism dropped among a tight cluster of earthen dwellings and dark tile roofs. The contrast is deliberate. Shouning County has over 72% forest coverage, and the terraced slopes around Xiadang create a lush agricultural carpet. The building's lobed footprint navigates the sloped site without flattening it, and a curved access road connects it to the village street grid. The decision to keep the form compact, roughly 300 square meters of usable footprint within 467 total, means it sits lightly relative to its program.

Drone views reveal how the photovoltaic roof panels follow the building's double-curved geometry with remarkable precision. That alignment is the project's most consequential technical achievement: BIPV panels typically sit on flat or single-curved surfaces, and bending them to a Möbius-derived form required close coordination between HATCH and the builder, Fujian Guanyunxin Construction Engineering. The result is a roof that reads as a smooth, continuous surface rather than a bolted-on array.

Old Village, New Silhouette

At street level, the teahouse negotiates a tricky relationship with its neighbors. A villager in traditional dress passes beneath the cantilevered white volume, dwarfed by its scale but not oppressed by it; the building lifts its mass above the pedestrian zone, and timber eaves of existing structures still define the streetscape. Red paper lanterns strung between earthen walls frame views of the teahouse's curved balconies, producing an almost cinematic layering of old and new.

The white UHPC surfaces and rounded glass corners could easily feel hostile in a village of handmade textures. They do not, largely because the building's curves echo the organic topography of the surrounding hills rather than imposing a Cartesian grid. The continuous balcony wraps are generous enough to function as semi-outdoor rooms, blurring the line between structure and landscape in a way that recalls the stepped terraces of Xiadang's tea fields.

The Spiral Path

The Möbius strip concept pays off most legibly in the building's circulation. A spiraling external staircase winds visitors from ground level up through cantilevered terraces to a rooftop observation deck framed by glass panels and white metal railings. The ascent unfolds views sequentially: first the village roofs, then the forested valley, then the full sweep of mountain ridges. It is a promenade architecturale in the Corbusian sense, except the endpoint is not a machine for living but a place to drink tea while watching clouds move across Shouning's peaks.

Under bright daylight the exterior staircases and sculptural balconies cast sharp shadows across the UHPC, activating the facade with the kind of graphic depth that flat photovoltaic roofs rarely achieve. The timber treads of the stair introduce warmth against the white concrete, a material concession that signals the shift from public approach to intimate arrival.

Glass Rooms Over the Valley

At dusk the teahouse becomes a lantern. Its floor-to-ceiling glass walls transform the interior spaces, a dining area, a tea bar, a cultural exchange room, into illuminated tableaux visible from across the village. The rounded glass corners are structurally ambitious, eliminating opaque columns at the very points where views are most dramatic. White columns inside are slender enough to recede from the eye, leaving the landscape as the dominant surface.

The twilight images are among the most telling. They reveal how the building operates as a social beacon for a township investing in tourism. Xiadang's transition from poverty-stricken tea-farming community to ecotourism destination requires architecture that signals arrival and ambition. The glass pavilion, glowing against a forested hillside, does precisely that.

Interior Warmth Inside the White Shell

Inside, the continuous curves of the shell flow into a double-height dining space where a curved mezzanine floats above timber bar stools. Clerestory windows let in high-angled light while panoramic glass below frames the green hills. The material palette is restrained: white surfaces, timber seating, and polished floors. There is no decorative program competing with the views.

The circular bar counter at the ground floor anchors the tea service program. Its placement beneath clerestory windows and against a curved glass wall facing the mountains makes it the social core of the building. The stools are low and informal, encouraging visitors to linger. For a building so technologically loaded, with its BIPV skin and bi-directional vehicle-to-grid charging station at the base of the mountain, the interiors feel surprisingly calm. That restraint is the most disciplined aspect of the design.

The Spiral Staircase as Sculpture

The interior spiral staircase deserves its own mention. Viewed from below, its white curves and timber treads form a sculptural helix with integrated LED lighting along the handrail. The top-down view transforms it into a near-abstract graphic, a tight white spiral against warm wood. It is the building's most photogenic element, but it also does real work: connecting the ground-floor bar to the mezzanine and exterior terraces in a single continuous gesture that reinforces the Möbius concept.

From the curved terrace at the upper level, the staircase frames a sunset view over the tile-roofed village that collapses the distance between the building's futuristic ambition and Xiadang's deep agricultural past. That framing is intentional. HATCH's design philosophy here positions renewable technology not as a rupture with tradition but as a continuation of the cyclical, sustainable logic embedded in rural Chinese farming culture.

Photovoltaic Roof and Active Energy Systems

The roof is where the building's environmental claims become visible. Tiered concrete surfaces carry solar panels that follow the structure's compound curves, and metal railings define the usable terrace zones. The panels are not an afterthought; they are the primary cladding material, which means the roof's aesthetic is inseparable from its energy performance. Annual output of 55,000 kWh is substantial for a building this small, roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption of fifteen Chinese households.

The integrated intelligent charging station at the mountain's base adds another layer. Bi-directional car-to-grid functionality allows electric vehicles to feed power back into the teahouse's circuit, creating a micro energy network that extends the zero-carbon logic beyond the building envelope. CATL, as both client and battery technology leader, clearly sees this project as a demonstration vehicle for its broader energy ecosystem ambitions.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plans reveal the biomorphic logic driving the layout. The irregular, lobed perimeter wraps around a central spiral staircase, with dining tables and service spaces arranged along the curved edges to maximize window exposure. The plan is efficient despite its organic geometry; circulation and program overlap without collision. The wall section details expose a layered timber framing and insulation assembly behind the sleek facade, confirming that the environmental performance is not limited to the photovoltaic skin. The envelope itself is carefully insulated, a quiet but essential contribution to reducing energy demand.

Why This Project Matters

Zero-carbon buildings in China often arrive as corporate showpieces in first-tier cities, legible only to specialists and conference attendees. The CATL Teahouse places that ambition in a remote mountain township where tea farmers and tourists are the primary audience. That choice of context transforms the project from a technology demonstration into a genuine test of whether zero-carbon architecture can participate in rural revitalization. The answer, based on the spatial generosity of the interiors and the magnetic quality of the rooftop terrace, is a provisional yes.

The more lasting contribution may be formal rather than environmental. HATCH has shown that BIPV cladding can follow complex double-curved geometries without turning the building into a solar farm that happens to have rooms. The Möbius-derived plan generates a continuous spatial experience that justifies its own complexity, and the glass-and-UHPC material palette gives the shell a tautness that most net-zero projects, burdened by bolt-on panels and brise-soleils, never achieve. For a 467-square-meter teahouse in a village most architects will never visit, it sets an uncomfortably high bar.

CATL Zero-Carbon Teahouse Xiadang by HATCH Architects, lead architect David Wei, in collaboration with Fujian Guanyunxin Construction Engineering Co. Located in Xiadang Township, Shouning County, Ningde City, Fujian Province, China. 467 m². Completed 2024. Photography by Fangfang Tian.

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