Located at the heart of Luohu, Dongmen reflects the evolution of commerce in China, developing from a spontaneous village fair and burgeoning together with the growth of the city and the economy of China. Most buildings consist of small franchise stores and family-owned shops, which accommodate community life as much as commercial activities. The character “Xu ” from the region’s original name, Shenzhen Xu, meaning both market and village, still represents the mixture of business, working, and living. Dongmen features a building type that combines residential and commercial spaces vertically, with a datum in the middle serving as the public space for the residents. The studio focuses on two of such buildings built during the renewal of the region where residential and commercial remain isolated from each other. Learning from the history of the region and other Cantonese villages where living and working spaces organically wove together, the studio invites students to redesign this building type with an emphasis on the interface in between to encourage spatial and programmatic integration, and adapt to the ongoing changes in commercial environment and house market.