One House, One Strategy: Adaptive Reuse of Historic Residences in Lili Ancient Town

In the conservation and regeneration of historic water towns in China’s Jiangnan region, a persistent challenge lies in how sustainable pathways for the protection and use of historic buildings can be generated in the absence of predefined operational models. While large-scale restoration projects have improved the physical appearance of many towns, a substantial number of deep courtyard residences from the Ming and Qing periods continue to suffer from functional decline, long-term vacancy, and structural hollowing-out. These buildings are often incompatible with contemporary residential or commercial development models, rendering restoration-oriented conservation insufficient for sustaining their public value. Taking the China Pewter Museum as a practice, this paper examines the museumisation of Mao Residence, a Ming-dynasty historic building located in Lili Ancient Town, Wujiang District, Suzhou. Rather than treating “One House, One Strategy” as a policy concept applied in advance, this study traces how such an approach gradually emerged through concrete project-based experimentation during an early, exploratory stage of the town’s conservation process. The case demonstrates that the adaptive reuse of Mao Residence was not a replication of an existing model, but the outcome of sustained collaboration, trial-and-error, and continuous adjustment among local government authorities, heritage management bodies, and a private museum practitioner operating under conditions of governance uncertainty. Drawing upon municipal policy documents supporting non-state museums and publicly available materials, this paper analyses the practical logic of this transformation from four interrelated dimensions: spatial utilisation, functional conversion, institutional support, and public cultural impact. Through dialogue with the international concept of Adaptive Reuse, the study further argues that the “One House, One Strategy” approach represents a practice-generated governance logic characterised by a life-cycle perspective, in which content introduction and operational sustainability are incorporated into conservation planning at an early stage. The paper concludes by discussing the broader implications of this case for the activation of historic building stock in Jiangnan water towns, emphasising interpretive value over direct replicability. This paper presents a practice-based study of heritage conservation and adaptive reuse in Jiangnan water towns, based on long-term field involvement and institutional practice in Lili Ancient Town, Suzhou.