Viewed from outside, the residency is serious and grand, with long yards; viewed from inside, it is splendid and orderly, reflecting the residential style of big families in feudal society in North China.
The courtyard's three sides face the street, while the courtyard itself is completely surrounded by a 10-meter-high sealed water-milled brick wall. Yards and houses are linked with other yards and houses while the sidewalks above row upon row of roofs - such as the Xuanshan, Xieshan, Yingshan, Juanpeng, and Horizon roofs -- link up the battlements.
Yards contain smaller yards as well as gardens. The doors, windows, eaves, stone stairs, quadrangular railings, and the Chuanxin, Pianxin, and Jiaodao yard are all beautifully shaped. You can see brick carvings everywhere in the yards: backbone carving, wall carving, and railing carving, all of which are based on figures, allusions, flowers and plants, birds, beast, chess, and painting andcalligraphy. The carving designs are so exquisite and their workmanship, so fine, fully showing the special style of residential building in the Qing Dynasty.
The Qiao Family Grand Courtyard has been admired as a bright pearl of residential buildings in North China.
In the first ten years of the Republic of China, Qiao Zhiyong's eldest grandson Qiao Yingxia rebuilt the grand courtyard.
Qiao Yingxia believed in Catholicism, and admired Western civilization. Therefore the style of the new courtyard added many Western elements. Some windows had glass installed and were decorate in a Western style. Paintings under the eaves added some new things like trains and railroads. The living room in the northwest courtyard included a bathroom and a Western-style washroom.
Besides, the Qiao Family Grand Courtyard also collected many pieces of furniture made in the Ming and Qing dynasties as well as some rare treasures, like, the "nine-dragonlantern" and the "ten-thousand-person ball."
