The founding of “Five Cent Driftwood House” — one of Taiwan’s leading restaurants — is a unique story of a woman starting a successful business without any experience. Visitors to the restaurant spend more time exploring its strange and beautiful architecture than doing anything else. What makes this restaurant — from which later flourished a chain of restaurants — so unique is that it was built and founded by a woman, Li-Shian Hsieh, who has no experience or background in architecture.
The first restaurant was built in 2000 in the Chia-yi county of Taiwan. With its strange and attractive architecture, the restaurant soon became the talk of the town. Following the success of the first branch, Li-Shian was able to open two more branches a year later. All of Li-Shian’s restaurants have been filled with strange wonders, amusing visitors to the restaurant.
The story behind the restaurant is interesting and goes back to a few years. It started with Li-Shian inheriting a piece of land from her mother’s family. At that time she mastered the art of pottery and sculpture, and was also very interested in collecting building materials to use for building projects. It was then that she decided to blend her hobbies into developing her land and building a dream house. Through architecture, she wanted to transform her dream into reality.
Knowing that building a house would be costly; Li-Shian Hsieh decided to turn the site into a restaurant. She never thought that the restaurant would become famous and even end up becoming one of Taiwan’s tourist attractions.
What makes this place unique is that Li-Shian Hsieh only has a high school diploma. She has no other architectural qualifications. She believes that her creative architectural expertise came from her parents and says that everybody can be proficient as long as they are given the chance.
Hsieh’s building technique is also unique. Materials such as driftwood and bricks, which she collected, have all been carefully placed in unique positions. The process of building the restaurant has more to do with a technique of assembling collected artifacts together.
Most of Hsieh’s design concepts originate from nature. Due to her limited formal education, most of her techniques are also both natural and simple. The design concepts of her restaurants originate from the idea of dance. However, what has exceeded her expectation is the fact that such a style of architecture has received widespread acclaim in Taipei. In fact, while building her restaurants, she has not experienced any sort of municipal difficulties and so feels fortunate on being able to pass necessary red-tape smoothly.
Her three restaurants continue to astonish visitors with their united yet striking style that is evident in their external appearance, which flows into the interior.
However, municipal building regulations have limited her in implementing all of her design techniques in her Taichung and Taipei restaurants. For these two restaurants she had to move away from her original assembly techniques and use large-scale concrete sculptures as her main focal point. The sculpturing of two dancing girls, who are the main focal points of the two restaurants, remained a big challenge for her.
Completing the sculptors has been something Hsieh found satisfying, as she has never tried making such large-scale sculptures before. Finishing several giant sculptures at the same time was also something challenging.
While making the large sculptors and without previous experience on working on such large projects, Hsieh spent huge amounts of her time and energy in solving the problem of installing the heads on the sculptures, an almost impossible task to accomplish, which was yet done successfully. The interior of the sculpture was made from concrete carving, wood carving, pottery carving and metal carving to manipulate the appearances of over hundreds of female dancers.
Comparing the style and space of the previous two Five Cent Driftwood restaurants, local building laws, and fire and safety regulations limited the design of the Taipei restaurant (the final one). However, the restaurant’s current design is a breakthrough for Taipei’s architectural landscape, given the city’s complicated building regulations.
Today, Five Cent Driftwood House is a series of proud restaurants designed and created without professional architects at the helm. It is truly an architectural splendor.
