About PChouse

PChouse

PChouse (太平洋家居网, pchouse.com.cn) is a Chinese-language home, interior design and home-improvement portal based in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. It is the home channel of Pacific Online, the Guangzhou group behind the Pacific-branded vertical portals PConline, PCauto, PCLady, PCbaby and PCgames. PChouse covers home decoration and renovation, interior design cases, furniture, building materials and home appliances, and it presents itself on its homepage as a site for fashionable homes and professional product evaluation. Its official website is https://www.pchouse.com.cn.

Where a general portal treats the home as one lifestyle topic among many, PChouse treats it as a complete decision chain. A reader typically arrives with a project — a new flat to fit out, a kitchen to rebuild, a room to redecorate — and needs, in order, inspiration, a designer or a design to copy, knowledge of materials and brands, product prices, and warnings about what goes wrong. PChouse was built to hold all of those steps in one place, inside a group that had already proved the same vertical-portal model in computers and cars.

Part of Pacific Online, the Guangzhou vertical-portal group

PChouse's parent, Pacific Online Limited, runs what its own annual reports call the group's portals. The 2007 annual report lists the group's portal addresses as PConline, PCauto, PCgames, PCLady and PCkids, with the company's principal place of business on the 11th floor of the Pacific Electronics and Technology Plaza at 1–7 Shipai West Road, Tianhe, Guangzhou. By the 2010 annual report, the published list of group portal addresses had become PConline, PCauto, PCgames, PCLady, PCbaby and www.pchouse.com.cn — the home portal taking its place in the family — and it remained in the list in later reports, including 2013.

Pacific Online listed in Hong Kong at the end of 2007. The company's 2007 annual report records that the IPO raised its profile with both internet users and advertising customers, and company profiles describe Pacific Online Limited, stock code 0543 on the Hong Kong exchange, as an investment holding company providing internet advertising services in China through its portals. Profiles summarising the group describe each portal in one line, and PChouse's line is consistent: a portal offering professional perspectives on home improvement, alongside PConline for IT information, PCauto for cars, PCLady for women's lifestyle interests and PCbaby for parents and children.

The group's later annual reports show where the younger portals stood in the business. Reporting its 2012 results, Pacific Online said its other vertical portals, including PCgames, PCbaby and PChouse, continued to improve content and attract users as they gradually built scale, and that revenue for other operations including those portals rose 24.3 per cent, from RMB 37.0 million in 2011 to RMB 45.9 million in 2012. For 2013, the annual report records that revenue from PCgames, PCbaby and PChouse together increased by 38.8 per cent, and the group's management linked PCbaby's prospects in particular to the relaxation of China's one-child policy. PChouse, in other words, was one of the group's smaller, faster-growing lifestyle portals, carried by a parent whose money was made mainly in IT and automobiles.

Design cases and inspiration

The front door of PChouse today is visual. Its homepage leads with design cases and inspiration — in its own words, looking at cases and finding inspiration, showing fine home design and practical cases to spark ideas. Cases are browsable by style, and the styles offered on the homepage map closely onto contemporary Chinese interior taste: Italian minimalist, light luxury, wabi-sabi, original wood, French, modern, Nordic, new Chinese, American and Japanese, among others. That taxonomy matters, because the first question in a Chinese home renovation is usually not technical but aesthetic: which style is this home going to be?

The app built around the same content describes the offer in similar terms. The PChouse app, published by the group's Pacific internet information services company, describes the platform as a home-consumption decision platform for quality-conscious users, offering real design cases, direct access to designers a reader likes, home-renovation experience shared by bloggers, and well-designed, good-quality home products. Its listed features include finding a designer, whole-house cases — real complete homes that can be searched for a reference design, with renovation budgets and product lists attached — commercial space designs, and a large, continuously updated library of real home photographs.

Whole-house cases with budgets and product lists are the point where inspiration turns into a plan. A photograph tells a reader what a room could look like; a case that names the products used and what the renovation cost tells them whether they can have it. PChouse's structure — cases, designers, products and brands, all cross-linked — is designed to shorten exactly that distance.

Finding a designer and following the trade

Designers are the second pillar. The app promotes a directory of interior designers from across the country, with one-click contact and online consultation, and the website's design channel publishes designer interviews, design news and exclusive design features. PChouse covers the professional design world as well as the consumer one: its reporting includes, for example, extended interviews conducted with Guangzhou Design Week, among them a 2025 conversation with curator Qin Si about the Luxury Residence exhibition at that event, its themes across successive years and the relationship between exhibition and online digital home services.

That presence at Guangzhou Design Week is a natural fit for a Guangzhou-based home portal. The event is one of China's principal design exhibitions, held in PChouse's home city, and the portal's coverage of it — interviews with curators and designers, reports on themed exhibitions and materials showcases — serves the same professional audience that supplies its cases and its designer directory. A home portal that only aggregated photographs would not need that reporting; one that wants designers to publish their work and readers to hire them does.

The site also maintains home-industry awards and featured design programmes within its design sections, and its navigation has long included brand rankings, a brand library, product coverage, evaluations, an encyclopaedia, and activity and renovation channels. Together those sections make PChouse part magazine, part directory and part marketplace of ideas for the Chinese home-improvement trade.

Building materials, furniture and appliances: the product databases

The third pillar is products, organised with the thoroughness of a trade catalogue. PChouse's brand and product sections divide the home into building materials, furniture and appliances, and then divide those again, in detail. Under building materials, its listed categories run through bathroom ware, wall paint, chandeliers and lighting, doors and windows, tiles, flooring of many kinds, cabinets and whole kitchens, toilets and smart toilets, bathroom cabinets, ceilings, pipes, boards, switches and sockets, waterproofing and coatings. Under furniture they run through sofas, beds, wardrobes and custom whole-house furniture, tables, chairs, children's furniture and rosewood furniture. Under appliances they run from refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines and televisions to kitchen appliances, water purifiers, water heaters, air purifiers and smart-home devices.

This is the inherited strength of the Pacific model. PConline built its position on exhaustive computer product databases; PCauto on car model databases. Applied to the home, the same method produces a reference layer in which a reader comparing tiles, flooring, paint or a smart lock can move between brand information, product pages, evaluations and the cases in which those products actually appear. For advertisers — materials brands, furniture makers and appliance companies competing for a renovating household's large, concentrated spend — that reference layer, consulted at the moment of decision, is the commercial point of the portal.

PChouse's homepage tagline, fashionable home, professional evaluation, states the pairing plainly: style content to draw the reader in, and professional testing and evaluation to help them buy. Product recommendations on the current homepage are presented in that spirit, with individual furniture and lighting products described, priced and linked to purchase.

Renovation guidance and the homeowner's problems

Alongside cases and products, PChouse publishes the practical literature of renovation: decoration and renovation guides, an encyclopaedia of home knowledge, and experience content in which bloggers and homeowners describe what they did and what they would avoid. The app store description makes the promise explicitly — browsing bloggers' renovation experience to avoid pitfalls, in the Chinese phrase, with real ability. Renovation in China is a famously anxious purchase: a large sum, paid to contractors a household will use once, for work whose quality is hidden behind walls and under floors. Content that translates other people's mistakes into a checklist has genuine value, and it is a staple of the portal's decoration channels.

The audience implied by all of this is specific. PChouse's own app description calls its target quality users — homeowners with the income to renovate properly and the intent to spend on design and branded materials — and says the platform aims to influence their home-consumption decisions. That positioning, decision influence rather than raw traffic, is the same one Pacific Online's larger portals used with IT buyers and car buyers, and it is what the group sells to advertisers across the family.

Guangzhou, Guangdong and the home industry around it

PChouse's base is not incidental to its subject. Guangzhou is one of China's great trading and manufacturing cities, and Guangdong is the country's home-industry heartland: Foshan, in the same Pearl River Delta region, is a national centre for ceramics, sanitary ware and furniture, and terms such as Foshan tile and Foshan bathroom ware recur throughout PChouse's own category lists. A home portal headquartered in Guangzhou sits inside the supply region for much of what it covers, close to the brands, the exhibitions and the design events of the delta, including Guangzhou Design Week.

The Pacific group itself is a Guangzhou institution of the Chinese internet's first generation. Its annual reports place its principal business first at Shipai West Road in Tianhe District and later at Gaopu Road, Tianhe — the district that became Guangzhou's technology corridor. PChouse is the home-industry expression of that Guangzhou internet tradition: a specialist portal, in Chinese, for a national audience, run from the city where its parent built PConline into one of China's best-known IT sites.

Beyond the website: the app and social channels

Like the rest of the Pacific family, PChouse extended beyond its web portal as reading moved to phones. Its homepage directs readers to download its iOS and Android apps, and the app edition carries the same core assets — design cases, designer matching, commercial-space work and the image library — in a form a homeowner can browse on site, in a showroom or in a materials market. The app's listing also gives the platform's official WeChat public account, PChouse2012, and a WeChat mini-program under the Pacific Home name, the standard pair of social channels through which Chinese consumer media of its generation kept daily contact with readers between website visits. The portal's business, however, has remained the same through those format changes: cases to inspire, designers to hire, brands and products to compare, and guidance to renovate by.

Why PChouse matters

PChouse matters because it completes the map of Pacific Online's vertical China. The group organised the big consumer decisions of a Chinese household into separate, deep portals: PConline for computers and electronics, PCauto for cars, PCLady for women's lifestyle, PCbaby for children — and PChouse for the home itself, the largest and most complicated purchase project of all. Its documented record is modest in scale beside the group's IT and auto flagships, but persistent: present in the group's portal list by the 2010 annual report, growing with PCbaby and PCgames in the results of 2012 and 2013, and still operating today as a design-case, designer and product platform with web and app editions. For anyone tracing how Chinese consumers learned to research a renovation online, PChouse is one of the addresses where that habit was formed.