Dahu Recreational Retreat

Can ‘work’ and ‘productivity’ be once again ‘unplugged’ from an urban office? Can nature provide an alternative?

Planned for a fast-growing software company, this project is an innovative study for a countryside leisure-and-working environment for its staff of more than 100. It is intended to conceive a new way of working and team-building in the post-Covid context. A decentralised network of recreational and working facilities is spread out over a private 6.8-hectare site including graceful farmland, rolling hills and mature forests. Small-scale structures in a variety of forms accommodate the necessary mobile offices, gym, café, dorm rooms and guesthouses. These are complemented by outdoor facilities infused in the environment, such as campsites, an outdoor cinema, yoga and fitness facilities, playgrounds and swimming ponds. Shapes, forms and textures are lively and varied, emphasising openness and comfort as well as durability in the natural setting.

The main facilities centre is set against the hillside, with functions encompassing accommodation, team offices, conference rooms, a bar, dining facilities and terraced swimming ponds that follow the site’s natural contours.

The architecture expresses the project’s underlying ideas of ‘teamwork’ and ‘collaboration’: a family of curved, leaf-like canopies, each floating on slender columns, gathered together like fallen leaves on the hillside to form one community.