In the past two years, the urban middle class's yearning for rural life has reached its peak. Some people moved their families to the countryside to live permanently, and some enjoyed the suburban migration life of "five days in the city, two days in the countryside".
Escape the city and stay in a large country house
Mao Jihui and his wife Su Yan decided to create a healthier and more natural environment for their daughter to grow up. So they moved out of Beijing and headed north, settling in a quiet village.
Finally, they came across a farmhouse built 16 years ago. The courtyard covers an area of two and a half acres and is planted with 44 fruit trees. They decided to renovate the small compound to make it more suitable for a family of three.
The process of transformation was not easy, but it was difficult for the couple. Su Yan was the editor-in-chief of Home Magazine, where she was responsible for the soft furnishings and furniture matching in the home, while Mao Jihui was an interior designer and was responsible for the planning and design of the structure of the house.
After 4 months, the layout of the house has changed qualitatively. They redesigned the roof, installed floor-to-ceiling windows and designed play areas for their daughter. Finally, the living room, dining room, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, two storage rooms and boiler room were harmoniously divided into their new home. Mao Jihui said the migration was like "a new urban youth going to the countryside, with both bitterness and pleasure."
More and more people with design or art backgrounds like Mao Jihui and Su Yan have moved out of the city and into rural courtyards of their own design.
Designers Xiaoxiao and Buchuan chose to live in the village of Damoyu, 20 kilometers from Kunming City, and together with friends, they jointly designed their own cottage and set up a studio. They live here two days a week, do not install broadband in the small courtyard, and only use mobile phones for daily communication.
There is also dessert chef Hu Xiaoyu and designer husband Zhang Quanxun, who renovated an old house in Taicang, Jiangsu Province, to build a living space of nearly 400 square meters with a southern French country style. In the middle of a large lawn in the yard, they built a glass house built on a half-red brick structure, where the little fish would do some gardening.
The rooms are clean brownish and white, with floor-to-ceiling windows and doors, a right-angle fireplace, mosaic tiles, and objects from various vintage furniture stores to form such a French-style two-story villa.
The painter, who has lived in Beijing for many years, visited villages in Guilin where few tourists lived, dealt with local villagers, moved an old house into the mountains, and then remodeled and redesigned it.
These well-educated people with aesthetic education, with their unique designs, provide a lot of ideas for more and more ordinary people who want to escape the city and live in rural courtyards.
According to data compiled by DT Finance, last year, there were more than 1,000 notes under the topic of "rural courtyards" on Xiaohongshu. The most commonly discussed relevant keywords are "renovation", "villa" and "design".
Similarly, on Douyin, the topic of "old house renovation" has been played more than 100 million times. Self-media bloggers have recorded the process of transforming their old houses, netizens have seen the possibility of leaving the big city in the process of rebuilding these old houses, and even some netizens have begun to comment on appointments under their favorite houses, to experience the same pension life of bloggers.
Want to enjoy, first explode and change?
Large area, great view, cheap rent... It has attracted more and more urban white-collar workers to rent houses in the countryside.
A better country courtyard can be called a plain white-walled green brick Dewa. But more people may encounter old, broken, and dilapidated adobe houses, with leaking roofs, leaking windows, and imperfect kitchens and bathrooms, which can be called true and original wabi-sabi.
Source: Xiaohongshu blogger @Qinglanyuanshan
@Qinglan Toyama spent a year and a half renovating the yard
Almost everyone who wants to experience the laid-back and quiet village life has to go through a big battle of change.
Little Red Book blogger @ Action! The Sugar Sisters are two girls with design backgrounds who spent 150 days in their hometown in Anhui Province renovating a 500-square-meter rural courtyard. They remodeled the kitchen, built a new bathroom, and redesigned the structure and space of the interior. Brick building, cement laying, tiling, carpentry, they all did it with their families.
It is precisely because the hardware conditions of the house have no advantages, and some places can be rented for a whole year for 3,000 yuan. In Tongzhou, Beijing, renting a yard covering an area of 500 square meters is only 45,000 yuan per year.
On the beautiful new village of the intermediary platform, the average price of farm houses around Beijing is 35,600 yuan / year, which is also the average price of rough red brick houses in most initial state, while the price of some small courtyards that have completed fine decoration is usually more than 100,000 yuan / year.
In addition, the distance from the main urban area, the structure of the house, and whether the road is paved in the courtyard all affect the specific price of the small courtyard. For example, the rent of an 8-room "boutique yard" with a total area of 324 square meters in Miyun is 120,000 yuan per year.
After all, rent is not expensive, so people who rent these houses will also be willing to spend several times more expensive than rent to transform this "old and dilapidated" into their own "dream love room". Someone spent four or a half million to renovate the inside and outside of the yard, buy soft furnishings, change the layout, and modify it into a variety of styles they like.
It is not difficult to imagine that these renovations from scratch require a lot of energy from tenants, usually to transform a small rural courtyard to go through the process of drawing plans, determining style, starting construction, changing soft furnishings, etc., most of which take more than half a year, and even some large yards take nearly two years to complete.
Little Red Book blogger @Demodo
Despite the time and effort, the urban middle class is eager to try the renovation of rural houses. In addition to cheap and large houses, the small yards in front of and behind each self-built house are also attractive to them. Some larger yards have vegetable gardens, orchards, and even fish ponds.
Many people return to the pastoral life here, grow their own vegetables for self-sufficiency, and grow vegetables and raise flowers in their leisure time. You can see the rivers and fields of the countryside in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, and you can fall asleep listening to the chirping of birds and insects at night. In the open courtyard, tenants can also barbecue, picnic, camp, and even build a stadium.
Dali, which is a popular tourist destination, has set off a wave of small courtyard renovation since 2020. On station B, the most transformation videos are located in Yunnan. Many small courtyards in the ancient city, Cangshan and Erhai have been transformed by young people into small courtyards of various styles, and the rent is 2500-4000 yuan / month.
As soon as I lived in the countryside, the dream of "paradise" was shattered
However, the beauty in short videos is always out of reach, and not all people are suitable for renting a yard in the countryside for a long time. As more and more people moved into rural courtyards, more "dissuasion posts" appeared on social media.
Some people have encountered a lot of difficulties when renting a yard. Due to the nature of homesteads, these rural yards can only be rented for up to 20 years, and although some landlords promise to give away a few years after 20 years of rent, the part that is more than 20 years is invalid and it is easy to cause disputes.
Some landlords ask tenants not to modify the layout of the room, or sign a long-term lease and then regret raising the price. There are even bloggers who have encountered the situation that the small courtyard in front of the door is occupied by the landlord's relatives and cannot be rented completely.
Even if they are lucky enough to avoid the pit of renting and renovation, rural infrastructure has become a problem for many urban residents. Without shopping malls, entertainment life is pitiful, let alone takeaway. Not only that, but city dwellers also have to adapt to the possibility of water and electricity outages at any time, muddy land after rain, and mosquitoes that cannot be eliminated in summer.
"Little Forest" is a must-see drama for rural pastoral life fantasy
This is not over, the "plum Ziqi" pastoral life you yearn for is likely to end up in a mess. Weed cleaning and flower maintenance in the yard consume a lot of energy, and how much fertilizer to plant vegetables and how to remove insects to grow well for their own consumption are not something that can be achieved overnight.
After such a toss, many long-term rental residents are exhausted. And some white-collar workers who want to work in the city at the same time also find that their work occupies more time, and their energy is very limited, and they can only go to live for two days on weekends when they are idle, and at the end of the year, 3/4 of the yard is idle, and the beautiful vision of "working in the city, rural life" can only be realized in dreams.
A similar situation is plague young Japanese fleeing Tokyo.
In recent years, in order to attract more young people to migrate to rural Japan to contribute to the labor force, the Japanese government has continuously introduced various incentives, such as providing $500 for cheap houses and tax incentives, to attract the population of Tokyo and Osaka to move to abandoned houses in "ghost villages".
Or offer high subsidies of up to $7,700 per child in a family to persuade them to move out of the Tokyo metropolitan area and live in a new area for five years. Rewards of up to $23,000 can also be earned if the family is relocating, starting a business, working in a small or medium-sized company, or working remotely.
A Japanese couple moved from bustling Tokyo with two children to a remote village. At first, life was quiet and comfortable, but after living for a year, due to work conflicts, they were ostracized by the indigenous people of the local village, and the couple had to dismiss the idea of continuing to renovate the small courtyard and moved out of the country.
Some Japanese netizens left a message under the video, "I hope that more people can spread the story of regretting moving because of rural customs."
Written by: Citrus
The source of the picture is the Internet, and the copyright belongs to the original author