Our Blog - Our Shanghai Apartment

We lived in Shanghai, China for a total of 3 years (originally planned to be 2 years). This was our Shanghai apartment, which was located in the PuDong district on the East side of the river. Here is a nice map that shows the location and the location of Tom's office:

and the apartment with respect to Susan's walk to the metro each morning:

and an attempt to show the apartment with respect to the whole of Shanghai (although I'm not sure exactly where the boundaries end up:

The apartment is in a complex called Skyline Mansion. The complex encompasses a city block and contains 3 apartment buildings as well as a clubhouse, which houses the gym, the indoor pool and a restaurant that serves breakfast. There is also a pool table and pingpong table. Here is a picture of the 3 buildings in the complex area, taken from the JinMao tower which is 2 blocks away:

This is a slightly closer view. The little round building is the stairs of the clubhouse and the apartment building that you see is actually our building. The gym/clubhouse is obstructed in this picture by the crane of the construction site next door.

Let me describe the apartment. It is on the 26th floor of one of the 3 buildings that make up the Skyline Mansion complex. This is across the street from where they are building the Shanghai Tower, which will become the 2nd tallest building in the world, and the tallest in China. There are 3 apartments on the floor and we are kinda in the "middle" of the other 2 (based on where the doors in the hallway are). There is a nice lobby in the building and it kinda reminds me of a hotel lobby where there is a bellman always there to open the door of the taxi when it pulls up in the little circle in front of the main door. There is always someone downstairs working in each building 24 hours a day. There are 2 entrances to the complex, one on each side, with gates at the entrances. This is pretty common for these types of complexes it would seem from walking around.

Coming in the front door, you a small foyer with a shoe cabinet. This is typical in Chinese apartments where people do not wear shoes in the house. They put the shoes in the cabinet at the front door, and wear slippers inside the house.

The apartment has wood floors throughout (without any area rugs) with the exception of the bathrooms and kitchen which are marble (or marble-lookalike). From the foyer if you turn left, you go into an L-shaped kitchen that leads to a "back balcony" which is where the washer & dryer are, as well as the air conditioning units for the apartment and the hot water heater.

Back the other direction, you go into the dining room which contains a large rectangular table with 4 chairs, which is open to the living room. At this point, it seems I haven't taken any pictures of either living or dining rooms, so I'll have to get those posted later. The living room has a sofa and 1 chair, as well as an "entertainment center" with the TV and DVD player. So far, the TV reception has been pretty bad. We have satellite programming and it seems that when it is rainy/overcast, we have literally no reception with the TV. Hopefully once "monsoon" season ends (my words .. it has rained here for almost a week straight), we'll have TV again! There is a balcony off the living room .. fairly wide but not all that deep. You could fit a small table and chairs out there if you wanted.

The apartment, which is a bit over 100 sq meters, is listed as 2 bedrooms, although we have it configured as 1 bedroom and an office. This is the master bedroom. It has a double-bed and two small nightstands. There is one armoir which we both have to share, which is a little tight for all of our clothes, but we have to make due :-)

At the foot of the bed, there is another TV and an alarm clock/radio. There is also a pretty good-sized bathroom off the master as well as another full bathroom outside of the Office.

On the other side of the living room from the Master is the 2nd bedroom which we are using as an office. It has a desk and chair as well as a sofa-bed. It doesn't have a closet or armoire, but it does have a nice set of bookshelves which is handy for storing a bunch of things! And no worries ... anybody who comes to visit us gets the Master bedroom during the visit!!

The apartment is individually owned and rented out, and the furnishings are all based on the taste of the landlord. It is a "serviced" apartment, so in addition to being furnished, it also comes with dishes (set of 4, with a couple pans), linens/pillows/towels, and a couple appliances like a hot water kettle, iron and ironing board. It also comes with a "management company" that we can call to help us with things as well as housekeeping services once per week.

The apartment is a couple blocks from the main river that goes through Shanghai and this is the view of the river from our apartment balcony.

And a couple pictures from the balcony at night