Moller Villa

Moller Villa (马勒别墅, Mǎlè Biéshù) is a Nordic-style house at 30 Shaanxi South Road, built for the shipping businessman Eric Moller (埃里克·马勒) and now a hotel. It was listed as a national key cultural relic protection unit in 2006.

Sources disagree on when it was built. Chinese Wikipedia says plans for renovation and expansion were submitted in May 1927 and approved on 14 June 1927, that the expansion was finished by December 1935, and that the boundary walls were completed in July 1937. The same article’s timeline gives construction from 1929 to 1936, and English Wikipedia gives 1936 as the completion year. No source read here names the architect.

Chinese Wikipedia describes a Nordic-style garden villa with Gothic and Tudor Revival elements, steep roofs, and some Chinese details in the garden and interiors. English Wikipedia adds brown-tiled roofs, spires and steeples, and glazed tiles.

A story circulates about its origins. English Wikipedia says the design was supposedly based on a sketch drawn by Moller’s daughter from a dream. The Chinese Wikipedia article does not mention it, and the source English Wikipedia cites for the villa’s history is titled “Moller Villa, the legend and the reality”. It is a story, and this page does not treat it as fact.

During and after the war the house changed hands. English Wikipedia says the Japanese military and then the Kuomintang occupied it. Chinese Wikipedia says that after 1949 it was used by the Shanghai Public Security Bureau and then by the Shanghai committee of the Communist Youth League.

In January 2001 the Hengshan Group took over the building. It opened to the public in May 2002 as the Hengshan Moller Villa Hotel (衡山马勒别墅饭店). Chinese Wikipedia also lists it in the first batch of Shanghai excellent historic buildings, in 1989. None of the sources read says whether non-guests can enter.