Woo’s House

Address: No. 33 Tongren Road

Text with kind permission from www.Hudec.cn

Mr. DV Wu Tongwen’s Residence, formerly Shanghai Urban Planning Design Institute, now with restaurant facililities on the ground floor and office for Zhonghenghao International Trade (Shanghai) Com., Ltd on the upper floors, is situated at No. 33 Tongren Road. Containing over 2,000 square-meters of building area, the four-storey reinforced concrete structure was designed in September 1935 and completed in July 1938. Because of the surface covered with green glazed tiles, it is commonly known as “”the green house”".
This residence is one of Hudec’s masterpieces which integrated a modern architecture with Art Deco style. By putting the main body of the building in the north of the site along East Beijing Road and by building a curved solid boundary wall along the road corner, a large private garden was created in the southern part of the site. There are rooms for different functions such as a banqueting hall, a ballroom, the billiard room, bar, chess room, and greenhouse etc. Composed by graceful curves and straight lines, the simple design of the facade, horizontal balcony, large pieces of curved glass and grand stream-lined outdoor staircase, make the house like a steamship with complete liveliness that visualizes an extreme modernized image. In addition to the first utilization of a small-sized lift in a private residence in Shanghai, the luxurious decoration and elements s of the house include a sun-parlor with glass ceiling, small ballroom with spring floors, full sets of air-conditioning equipment, kitchen and toilet appliances. The house is still a novel design for its indoor staircase paved with marble, imported from Italy, with its cast copper handrail, the glass safety plates, and the copper radiators embedded in the walls. The wall of the staircase and the upper part of the bounding wall were both decorated with special cast iron in the Art Deco style.
The house was once well known as “one of the most spacious and luxurious residences in the Far East”". (The building was listed as Heritage Architecture of Shanghai in 1994)

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