It all started as a joke among a group seven good friends who’ve known each other for two decades or more. They would retire together some day and live out their last days together.

By chance, one of them found an old 700 square meter house in suburban Guangzhou in 2018, roughly 70 kilometers away from the city center.

The group pulled together some 4 million yuan ($580,000) and renovated it to create their dream retirement home.

The result is a beautiful three-and-a-half story house set in the hills, with glass boxes overlooking paddy fields.

There is ample space on the ground floor for communal living, while the rooms upstairs are all separate from each other.

To prevent the arrival of the day when they would be a bunch of cantankerous retirees fighting with each other, they decided that each of them would pick up a different skill that would be useful to their lives in retirement.

One of them would specialize in cooking, another in growing vegetables, and the others in music, traditional Chinese medicine and so on.

[Yitiao]