On Minzu Road in Zhongshan, a narrow historic building has been adapted into Minzu Lane Coffee. The existing structure is a traditional qilou dating to the Jiaqing period of the Qing dynasty, with brick masonry, a timber frame and its original firewalls still present.
Modum Atelier approached the 77-square-metre project as both an interior reorganisation and a small act of urban repair. The café needed a workable sequence within a long, constrained plan, but the intervention also had to respect the building’s accumulated character and its place in the surrounding streetscape.
A compact project with two scales
The interest of the project lies in this double task. At the scale of the room, the design must support circulation, service and moments of pause without making the narrow volume feel overworked. At the scale of the street, the renewed use gives an old shop-house type a contemporary role while keeping its material history legible.
Rather than treating the historic shell as scenery, the project frames reuse as an ongoing relationship between programme and memory. The café becomes a practical new layer inside a building that already carries the construction logic and urban identity of Minzu Road.
Architecture: Modum Atelier. Lead architects: Zhou Ruizhe and Yang Kunbo. Area: 77 m². Completed: 2025. Photography: Guowei Liu. Source: ArchDaily; project information supplied by the architects.