Maria Barbieri remembers the first night she spent in her new villa - the unexpected tranquility of the Shanghai suburbs felt so eerie she got up in the middle of the night thinking something was wrong.
For anyone who has lived in the mainland's noisy business capital, where car horns can be heard into the wee hours, Ms Barbieri's reaction to the hush was understandable.
'I didn't even know where I was,' says the freelance Italian film producer, recalling the first night she slept in the 300-square-metre villa in Qingpu district in the city's northwest. 'I had come from living in Gubei, which was right in town and next to traffic, and here the silence was so deep it was almost waking me up.'
Having lived in China on and off since 1979, when she was one of the early foreign-language students, Ms Barbieri and husband Ken Rippen, an engineer, previously rented. When their last place in Gubei, a busy residential area popular with expats, was put up for sale in 2004, the couple feared they would not be able to continue renting from the new owner.
'We started to look around for other places and after a couple of months we found this place and liked it,' she says. 'We had not set out to buy a house, but we thought it would be a good investment.'
Such foresight proved wise. Since buying the minimalist and unfinished villa for 3.1 million yuan second hand, the couple invested another 900,000 yuan in renovations. Ms Barbieri says the move into home ownership was a good investment as a similar home in the 72-unit compound is now on the market for 6million yuan. She says, however, that two years before buying the villa, the first owner had paid 6,000 to 7,000 yuan a square metre for the property. 'We bought for 11,000 yuan a square metre, almost double. But we needed a place to live and we thought the market was bound to grow.'
The Shanghai market has been growing from an average 3,026 yuan a square metre in 1998 to 5,118 yuan per square metre in 2003, according to the National Development and Reform Commission and National Bureau of Statistics. In the most recent figures, for 2005, this rose to 6,842 yuan per square metre.
