Premier villas surrounding golf in Chengdu's most desirable community.

Villas 

Owning a freestanding villa, especially one alongside a golf course, is greatly sought after by Chinese buyers. Luxehills has established itself as not only the premier golf residential address in Chengdu, but attracted residents from China's largest cities as buyers sought refuge from increasingly crowded, expensive and polluted areas. Over the course of a decade, Luxehills offered approximately 1000 villas to the Chengdu market.

Working closely with the development team at Wide Horizon, James Nicolay was responsible for the site planning and landscape architectural design of more than two dozen separate residential development precincts, many of which featured villas.  At Luxehills villas range from four extravagant, palatial homes in excess of 3000 square meters to several hundred luxurious single family homes of 600 to 1000 square meters in size. One of the most successful villa products were a series of homes ranging from 350 to 500 square meters, and smaller villas were also popular.

Responding to the ever-evolving market, each residential product was fine-tuned and customized site plans were prepared by Mr. Nicolay to create the most valuable, livable  and marketable communities. Each phase had its own fully built, furnished and landscaped sales model complex, ranging from four to six villas enabling buyers to preview and walk through prior to purchasing.

The site planning of Luxehiils, especially in villa areas, eschews the dogma of rigid, south-facing orientation and 'rubber-stamp' production housing. Unlike most projects in China, Luxehills offers unique, customized building settings and neighborhoods rather than mass-produced, cookie-cutter communities of identical villas on identical streets with identical orientations. By opening villas with numerous windows and usable indoor/outdoor spaces, a variety of building orientations responded to the irregular boundaries along the golf course.  By siting villas to take full advantage of the hilly topography, units were arranged so that many non-golf villas also enjoy views of fairways. Most importantly, utilizing the topography enabled Mr Nicolay to create usable garden areas from walk-out basement areas, garden areas off living rooms and elevated entries which provide privacy from the street,  Luxehills achieved high densities and high Floor Area Ratios for villa projects. Curvilinear streets and lushy planted streetscapes bring the size and scale of residential areas to friendly, human scale. Residents enjoy their leafy open spaces and the ability to walk within park-like residential settings despite small garden areas and moderate densities.

Ultimately, Luxehills is a residential community development, and selling villas, remains the client's objective. By working closely with the developer's team, Mr Nicolay helped to create design solutions which enabled villas to be sold at substantial premiums consistently. The success of the project is measured not only in the regular and almost immediate sell-out of each villa areas, but equally by the high occupancy and popularity residents enjoy by living in this community. 

Owning and living in a freestanding villa at Luxehills became the realization for about 1000 homeowners in Chengdu.

In addition to the financial success for its developers and the satisfaction of its residents, Luxehills has garnered more than forty awards - from architecture, landscaping, golf to community planning, marketing and operations.