It Seemed Like A Great Idea,

and it was,

a young entrepreneur known only by his nickname, “Coastline”, one night in 2018, while drinking with his good friend, architect Dong Xinmeng, he started talking about how great it would be to have a floating home, so he could fish and drink beer all day. One drink led to another, and by the end of the night, they had decided to make his dream a reality,

Dongshan County in China has a long history of sea fishing and aquaculture, so Coastline and his architect friend took inspiration from their large rafts to build the buoyant base of the mansion,

Coastline and his team of workers spent about a year trying to solve the matter of electricity. They originally hooked up the place to a nearby hydropower installation, but fishing boats passing by routinely unplugged the cables. Over time, the Coastline negotiated with the fishermen to pay attention to his cables, and even though his cables stretch for 3km all the way to a dock on shore, they haven’t been unplugged in a year now,

but it was not all plain sailing, building a home on a floating base turned out to be more problematic than Coastline had imagined. The platform bobbed up and down as workers moved on it, and the strong winds didn’t help things either. The sturdy structure was built using steel, and even though Coastline wanted to incorporate as much glass as possible into the design, he finally understood that he had to sacrifice looks for sturdiness and reliability,

Coastline’s amazing floating home is held in place by 16 metal anchors, each weighing about a ton. If the owners ever want to move it, all they have to do is raise these anchors and have a powerboat tow the mansion to its new location, at 600 square meters, this amazing floating home has plenty of both indoor and outdoor space. After it was completed, in 2019, Coastline started using it as a vacation place where he could be alone, fish all day and just reflect on his life and his future plans,

the floating home, named Haixi, offers a 360-degree view of the sea, and is located in a calm bay, about 500 meters from the coast of Dongshan. It cost Coastline and Dong Xinmeng only 4 million yuan ($61,200), which he considers a bargain. The price per square meter is under 7,000 yuan, and considering prices in bustling cities like Xiamen can reach 80,000 yuan per square meter in some places, Coastline couldn’t be happier with his investment, in a recent interview with Yit, Coastline said that whenever he came here, he just disconnected from the stress and turmoil of his daily life. He set himself a limit of checking his smartphone just 3 times a day, didn’t speak to anyone, and spent his time doing what he enjoyed most, fishing and cooking whatever he caught, before the pandemic hit, the most he had spent alone on his fabulous floating home was 7 straight days, in which the lack of human contact made him feel like the last person on Earth. When the pandemic started in China, Coastline brought his wife and 2-year-old son to the house, and they isolated themselves from the rest of the world for 21 days. He and his son fished and drove around in a boat all day, and in the evening they watched movies together, what a neat idea for a home, as it happens we have mentioned an unusual floating home before, and this one much closer to home, I wonder if you could build a similar home in the Thames estuary?