The first holiday home has been built at the BIG-designed Hualien Residences, a mountain-shaped resort development in Taiwan (+ slideshow).

The 1,000-square-metre house is the first building on the site, which is five kilometres south of Hualien City, between the ocean and mountains.

There is a growing demand for second homes in the area, and a change in travel permissions between China and Taiwan is also expected to bring in a new wave of holidaymakers to the region.

The model home consists of layered volumes that create a zigzagging profile, with "green landscape stripes" and solar panels on the roof, and full-height glazing on the front and back.

The wide variety of buildings planned for the site all have similarly-jagged outlines. Once completed, their shapes will create a stylised version of the spine of mountains to the west.

BIG described the Hualien Residences as "a mountain landscape of commercial and residential program that reflect their natural counterparts in the background."

The strips of green roof meet the ground in on either side and run from east to west to block out the glaring morning and evening sun. When the development is complete, the roofs will create "canyons" between the buildings.

"The angled silhouettes add an almost traditional vernacular feeling of attics and porches in the middle of the dense modern development," said BIG.

Outdoor paths will snake around the site, while underground "jogging pathways" will be added to encourage residents to exercise. The complex will also house an on-site medical centre.

A path that wraps around the whole area will include an observation point, stage, shops, and restaurants and cafes with outdoor seating areas. Media rooms, lounges, libraries, pools and meditation areas will provide other communal spaces for the residents.

BIG was commissioned by Taiwan Land Development Corporation, the owner of the site in a former industrial and factory region of Taiwan, to create the scheme.

The show home was built to tempt potential buyers ahead of construction of the rest of the development, which is scheduled to complete in 2018.

KiBiSi – the Danish design supergroup co-founded by Ingels – has created furniture to compliment the architecture of the houses, which is on show in the model home.

The collection includes lounge seating and sunbeds, a wooden dining table, a lamp, a chest of drawers, a coffee table and shelving.

BIG has created a number of other housing projects with green roofs, including a foliage-covered terraced block of apartments in Stockholm and a residential building in Copenhagen with sloping planted roofs.

Photography is by Jinho Lee, unless otherwise stated.

Project credits:

Client: Taiwan Land Development Corporation
Collaborators: RJW, ARUP, Treegarden, Ken Sakamura
Partners-in-charge: Bjarke Ingels, Jakob Lange, Finn Nørkjær
Project manager: Andrew Lo
Design architect: Cat Huang
Showroom team: Eric Li, Anu Marjanna Leinonen, Jinho Lee, Kekoa Charlot, Alberto Herzog, Jaime Oliver Galienne, Horia Spirescu, Min Ter Lim, Junjie Yan, Dominic Black, Angelos Siampakoulis, Qianqian Ye, Emily King, Lucas Carriere, Miao Zhang, Ren Yang Tan, Andre Schmidt