Shanghai has no shortage of apartments spread across a sprawling metropolis of over 24 million people.

What makes Shanghai unique is the existence of lane houses – sometimes called “old houses” – that dot the Shanghai real estate landscape. These lane houses offer a much different lifestyle than your standard apartment building, with plenty of charm along with a few complexities.

What Exactly is a Shanghai Lane House?

Lane house is the English term for the Shanghainese ‘shikumen’, small clusters of three-story terrace houses that were built around the city in the early 20th century. They incorporated both Chinese and Western influences in their construction, showing the international influence within Shanghai at the time. The shikumen are all built with some form of gate from the street, leading to a central lane. These central lanes are usually just about wide enough to fit one car, but not much more, and extend to the back of the shikumen. As you walk down the lane from the street-side entrance, there are smaller, narrower lanes on either side which house the apartments, hence the English term, lane houses.

This style of accommodations, which once housed about 60% of Shanghai’s population, are being preserved by the government in certain areas by receiving a heritage architecture designation. There is even a dedicated Shikumen Museum in the Former French Concession area of the city. Unfortunately, as Shanghai expands and the infrastructure weakens under the pressure of the growing population, many older shikumen have been torn down as well.

These central lanes are often covered with clothes, towels, and sheets drying in the sun, hanging from any wire that people can find. There are bundles of electrical wires everywhere, heading in various directions, leaving me to wonder how it all works smoothly (hint: it doesn’t all the time). Most days, someone parks a cart full of fresh vegetables and sets up shop in the central lane, selling to the residents in the surrounding lane houses. Each shikumen feels like a self-contained neighborhood, making a city of millions upon millions feel a little bit smaller.

These terrace houses were built originally as single family multi-story homes, but with the rise of the Communist Party in 1949, owners were required to divide up the living space, converting them into 3-5 separate apartments. This led to an interesting problem with the basic layout of the apartments.

For anyone who has lived in a multi-unit home, you would think that the setup would not be that hard to arrange. There could be an entrance from the lane that brings people into a common area with a stairwell leading to the upper floors, with apartments located off the main hallway. But these houses were not designed to be multi-family units, and the transition was hastily done.

The remodelling after 1949 left the ground floor kitchen and seating area as one full apartment. Upper apartments, which were bedrooms and living rooms in the old houses, are all accessed from the ground floor kitchen and hallway.  Thus, the main entrance into many lane houses requires stepping into the ground floor unit’s kitchen before climbing the stairs to the apartments above. Some may find this charming, while others may find this horrifying.

We looked at a few lane houses where residents were cooking lunch as we walked through the front door, trying to locate the stairwell to find an upper floor apartment. To be fair, the food smelled great, though I don’t think the women were fishing for a compliment.

Our Very Own Lane House

The lane house we decided to lease has a slightly different layout, since we are at the very end of one of the side lanes. Our front door leads to an entrance hallway instead of a ground floor unit.

So while we bypassed the awkwardness of having to walk through someone’s kitchen, we do have to deal with the most common lane house issue: the stairs. There are no elevators, only old, rickety stairs that are impossibly narrow and incredibly steep. To add to the issue, many residents use much of the hallway for storage, including drying clothes, water jugs, and cleaning supplies.

Making the stairs a bigger logistical issue is that in most lane houses, the updated and renovated units are on the top floors, so all the apartments we considered required climbing two flights of stairs. Not ideal, but not a deal breaker by any stretch.

And while we avoided walking through a ground floor kitchen, we do walk through the kitchens for the second floor unit and the other apartment on the third floor, which are in the hallway. When a home that was built to have one kitchen suddenly needs 3-4 more, the hallway is the only logical place to construct them. The same issue with space arises when trying to turn a multi-room floor into a coherent apartment. Without many other options, the other apartments in the building are broken up on each floor, with one door leading to a living room, another to a bedroom, and another to the bathroom.

The benefit to us, with the daily death walks up and down the steep stairs to the third floor, is a spacious an updated apartment.

The top floor units of lane houses are often updated with Westerners in mind (real estate listings love to mention IKEA furniture, which is a buzzword for Western-friendly). There is a ton of light, the ceilings are taller, and many apartments have balconies with incredibly views thanks to the low-lying homes nearby. These apartments have become incredibly popular with Westerners, many of which utilize the tall ceilings to construct loft-style units.

Our unit is two stories, in a more duplex-style rather than a true loft. It has funky tiles in the bathroom and balcony. The floors are original hardwood and our landlord added plenty of built-in storage and wardrobes to make life a little easier.

Is life in a Shanghai lane house perfect? Of course not. Our hot water is temperamental, going from cold to searing hot with a blink of an eye. We have to run our wall-mounted heaters constantly since our 1920s building was not built with fabulous insulation.

Our complex consists of mostly people 70 or older. We are the youngsters in this neighborhood. The old women across the hall takes care of the water bill for the entire building, so they ask us each month for our part of the bill (how they determine it, I’m not quite sure). Last month it was ¥3.50 ($.50). Our older, more surly neighbors below have even started to turn on the lights in the hallway below when they see us coming, since there is no light switch for the stairwell (adding to the mystique of the stairs of death). Our new goal in life is to charm this family. I recently got a win, when the husband said hi to me (obviously in Mandarin, our Shanghaiese is…nonexistent).

The hallway fills with the smell of frying garlic and ginger each day as the old woman downstairs stir-fries lunch in her wok. It is like the world’s best air freshener.

Living in a lane house feels unmistakable Shanghai and makes all of the visa complexities required to move here totally worth it.. We could have lived in an apartment complex, surrounded by other Westerners, perhaps with a doorman. But that is so easy. We wanted a challenge. Heck, we moved from London to China specifically to challenge ourselves and push the envelope. Why not start with our home?

So, here we are, a few months into our lane house living, and we’re feeling positive overall. It’s getting cold and we have heaters and dehumidifiers running, but we’re also filling our space with beautiful and treasured things. It’s becoming home, even with the strange water bills and the unsmiling guy downstairs. It’s all part of the adventure, one we’re happy to be part of.