Are the real luxury mansions in China not located in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, but in the large rural courtyards?

What should you do if you have more than a hundred relatives and there is no enough space to accommodate all of them when you return home for the Spring Festival?

For ordinary families, the solutions are adding extra beds, sleeping on the floor, or checking into a hotel when there is no other option. But a family in Anxi, Fujian came up with a very straightforward answer: build a 15-floor building.

This building has a total of 15 floors above and below ground, with two underground floors for parking. Floors 2 to 12 each have two residential units, totaling 22 units, each covering an area of about 200 square meters. The building is equipped with elevators, and the ground floor has commercial shops. During the Spring Festival, four generations of more than 100 family members can live in it together.

Netizens: Did they just build a whole residential complex for themselves?

This building is a special case left over from more than a decade ago, when multiple clansmen jointly applied for homestead land and built it together. Today, it is almost impossible to replicate: the local government no longer allows self-built houses to be constructed to such a height, and most rural self-built houses across the country are only three or four floors high.

But don't underestimate these three or four floors. Calculated by about 100 square meters per floor, three floors add up to 300 to 400 square meters. For young people who even have to share a desk with the dining table in their rented rooms in the city, this space is more than enough to give full play to their ideas: a 6-meter-high living room, a French-style spiral staircase, a patio large enough to plant a tree indoors, a full floor-to-ceiling window facing the distant mountains, and finally even an elevator installed.

On social media platforms, various luxury rural mansions are constantly refreshing people's imagination of self-built houses. On Xiaohongshu, the topic "Appreciation of Self-built Houses" has accumulated more than 9.99 million views and over 1 million discussions, while the Douyin topic "Returning to the Village to Build a House" has reached 220 million views.

More and more young people realize that instead of burning themselves out in the fierce competition in the city, it is better to return to the countryside and build a large house.

01. Self-built Houses Have Entered the Next Level

When hearing the phrase "return to the village to build a house", many people's first reaction may be just one word: tacky.

For example, houses like this: Roman columns, European-style arched windows, Chinese landscape paintings, golden double doors, cement railings and iron sheet awnings are all gathered together, as if all the samples from the building materials market have been stuffed into the same building.

Or houses like this: the exterior walls are covered with colorful tiles, the roof is paved with red tiles, the stainless steel railings are polished to a shine, a large cement area is reserved in front of the door for drying rice, and a gilded couplet is pasted, which looks very festive in bright red.

But now, rural self-built houses have quietly updated their versions. More and more houses that look like they have walked out of magazine covers have appeared in various regions, including American pastoral style, French mid-century style, Italian light luxury style, as well as Tuscan and Mediterranean styles, which are very avant-garde.

In Nantong, Jiangsu, a two-story self-built small building with warm beige exterior walls brings the laid-back vibe of the Mediterranean to the water town. Cacti are planted under the arch outside, a viewing balcony protrudes from the second floor, and the house has a full wall of log bookshelves running through the two floors, a white spiral staircase and a retro fireplace.

In the yard, a European-style white fountain is located among the lush green plants. This is not Nantong at all, it is clearly more like the south of France!

In rural Zhejiang, someone spent 280,000 yuan to build a two-story small building. The warm yellow exterior wall is hung with sky-blue wooden shutters, the interior has exposed log sloped roofs and Morandi blue cabinets, paired with the soft texture of white sofas, which looks very much like a French rural residence in the movies.

In rural Sichuan, someone built a 400-square-meter self-built house with the feel of a vacation courtyard. A sunshade is set up under the eaves, the lawn in the yard is large enough to hold an inflatable swimming pool, and you can see the blue sky and tree scenery as soon as you lie in bed.

In rural Fujian, a 650-square-meter self-built house looks very much like an office building from the outside. When you enter the door, there is a 6-meter-high reception hall, the indoor courtyard is large enough to play table tennis, there are more than 80 windows of different sizes, and there are dedicated tea rooms and cafes.

In Hengyang, Hunan, a house built along the mountain has a total of 1700 square meters indoors and outdoors. The whole house has 9 toilets and 2 kitchens, as well as an independent laundry room, studio and study.

In Foshan, Guangdong, someone built a five-story 438-square-meter white small house on an 8*10-meter homestead. The pure white staggered minimalist geometric facade is very design-sensitive, and the interior soft decoration is in warm wood tones, making the rural self-built house look like a modern art gallery.

It doesn't have to be good-looking. Self-built houses are places where the owner's creativity can be fully brought into play. A village house in Chongqing that is renovated along the mountain slope directly turns the height difference into an overhead underground floor, and also incorporates the original pigsty into the house, so that people can feed pigs without going out.

On the hillside of Songtao County, Tongren, Guizhou, a steel bar worker did not hire an architect, and poured out a concrete castle for himself with a rough hand-drawn drawing: the floors are uneven, round windows, square windows and diamond windows are opened at will, and the whole house looks like a rough version of Hogwarts. When the direction of the stairs was made wrong, he left it as a "no entry" path; cans filled with cement were used as stair railings, and the long slope at the entrance is planned to allow electric vehicles to drive all the way to the roof in the future.

Even Wolffy can have his own house. This steel-framed self-built house in the village of Shangqiu is dark gray all over, with spires, battlements and double chimneys, and even the windows are made into the shape of wolf claws. The owner said that he grew up watching "Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf" and always wanted to live in such a castle.

In Wuchuan, Guangdong, a seven-story small building narrows layer by layer, and the window holes are combined into eyes, nose and mouth. The 16 yellow columns on the roof form a crown, which looks like a large building block, with a trace of the owner's humor in the absurdity.

It can be seen that when people return to the village to build houses, what they build is not just a building, but a kind of residential freedom that is almost impossible to achieve in the city.

In the city, you spend millions or even tens of millions to buy a house, more than half of the cost goes to the land, the house type is determined by the developer, the balcony cannot be enclosed, and even where to hang the air conditioner outdoor unit is regulated. But in the countryside, as long as the homestead is compliant and the approval is passed, you can almost build the house as you like. If you love reading, you can leave a whole wall for the bookshelf, and if you need to raise pigs, you can also reserve a dedicated floor as a pig farm.

After these various rural luxury houses are shared on social media platforms, the most direct effect is to turn the comment section into a large-scale mobilization for returning to the hometown: the Chinese people's hidden yearning for their hometown is awakened, and they want to go back to their hometown to build houses.