Unlike many other major cities with rivers running through them, residential property along the riverside in Shanghai was an afterthought: Puxi, to the west of the Huangpu river, was dominated by commercial buildings, and Pudong, to the east, by wharves and warehouses.
And yet in 2005, the opening of Tomson Riviera, an upmarket apartment complex built on a prominent bend on the Pudong side, overturned the traditional price hierarchy of the city’s residential property market. Until then, the Puxi side of the river had always been more desirable, even if certain districts fell out of favour as Shanghai developed. In the 1990s, as office space and retail development took off, homes near the high-end retail shopping streets of Nanjing Road and Huaihai Road supplanted those in Hongqiao as the city’s most coveted real estate.
Tomson offered something different: easy access to the growing Lujiazui financial district and enviable views towards the historic Bund.