Above: Alex Chou, founder of Gochic Bicycle. Right: A rice showroom on Dihua Road.

completely possible to escape the crowds, even on a weekend. The park isn’t entirely dedicated to upand-comers: there’s a large department store operated by famed local bookstore and lifestyle chain Eslite, complete with a basement food court full of franchise restaurants. But also, just outside, is a handful of food trucks and (on the Saturday I’m there) an impromptu bazaar where nervous-looking artisans display handmade leather goods, finely carved wooden miniatures, and stuffed animals to an enthusiastic crowd of browsers.

Huashan 1914, by contrast, is decidedly more mainstream. On my way through the retrofitted former winery I spot storefronts for Sony, Twinings Tea, and Patagonia. However, there’s also a repertory cinema and several independent boutiques, as well as VVG Thinking, a restaurant and lounge by Taipei native Grace Wang’s VVG (“Very Very Good”) lifestyle brand. It’s set in a striking, almost gothic space defined by soaring ceilings and an abundance of shadowy nooks and crannies; there’s what looks like a Renaissance flying machine suspended from the ceiling and a loft full of cookbooks and kitchenware to browse—plenty to think about, in other words.

Just down the street from Huashan, I make my way to the workshop of former tenant Alex Chou, a Taiwanese-American designer who grew up in Los Angeles but was lured back to the land of his birth by prospects in the country’s manufacturing industry. He ended up designing bicycles—but not just any bicycles. His Gochic bikes are works of art in their own right, made painstakingly by hand with carefully sourced parts. Only around 100 are produced per year.

Gochic’s studio and showroom, set down a lane of old Japanese-built houses, is something of a temple for local cycling enthusiasts, who, thanks to the proliferation of bike lanes, are