West Garden Mansion



The last word in luxury in 1928 was this new building: each floor had only two flats of six rooms each, plus servants' quarters, pantries and service staircases off the kitchens. The living rooms contain massive Tudor-style fireplaces, as does the lobby. The dining rooms are wood-paneled and have built-in sideboards; unusual for their day. The roof terrace was shaded by a trellis, long since gone, as is the verdant front garden which gave the building its name.


The entrance lobbies of Shanghai's most elegant apartment houses were carefully planned, right down to the last detail:  mailboxes which matched the decor, as in the West Garden Mansions here shown. In other apartment hallways, however the sheer number of  tenants makes such aesthetic considerations no longer feasible, as this second picture clearly illustrates. In order to protect precious bicycles, apartment house lobbies are now also used for storage.

In contemporary Shanghai it is rare for one apartment door to have just one nameplate. In this picture a different bell serves each family.