The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development’s “13th Five-Year Plan for Prefabricated Buildings” (hereinafter referred to as the “Plan”) repeatedly emphasizes a key concept: “full decoration.” The Plan clearly advocates for promoting full decoration and modular-style finishes in buildings, encouraging dry construction methods to minimize on-site wet work. It also supports technological systems such as integrated kitchens and bathrooms, prefabricated partition walls, and the separation of main structures from pipelines.
Promoting fully decorated buildings and delivering prefabricated building components as finished products is highlighted as a vital strategy to advance the prefabricated building industry.
The “Evaluation Standards for Prefabricated Buildings (Draft for Comments)” propose that the load-bearing structures of prefabricated buildings should primarily be assembled from prefabricated components. It also stipulates the use of non-masonry methods for enclosure and partition walls, aiming to achieve full decoration. The adoption of full decoration has become a decisive factor in determining whether a building qualifies as prefabricated, underscoring its critical role in evaluation standards.
Thus, full decoration is not only a keyword but also a mandatory requirement. As prefabricated buildings rapidly develop, promoting full decoration has become an essential and unavoidable choice.
Full Decoration: The Essential Path to Enhancing Prefabrication
The State Council’s Guiding Opinions on Vigorously Developing Prefabricated Buildings (State Council [2016] No. 71) clearly define prefabricated buildings as structures assembled on-site using prefabricated components.
From this definition, it follows that prefabricated buildings must focus on the concept of “building,” where “assembled” means the building should be delivered in a fully functional, finished state. For civil construction types such as residential buildings, this translates to delivering fully decorated, finished homes.
Common quality issues in residential construction—such as roof leakage, poor door and window sealing, and insulation wall cracking—have long been criticized and harm the reputation of China’s building materials industry. These problems arise largely from outdated construction methods that allow for highly variable processes, making quality control difficult.
The Plan calls for factory-based manufacturing of components instead of on-site construction, ensuring consistent quality through industrial production. Assembly-based construction replaces manual masonry, significantly reducing human errors and improving overall build quality. Prefabricated construction enhances product precision, addresses systematic quality challenges, lowers post-construction maintenance costs, and extends building lifespan.
Statistics show that residential buildings make up over 70% of China’s housing construction. Thus, the residential sector is the primary battleground for implementing prefabricated buildings. Adopting full decoration alongside prefabricated construction methods can comprehensively elevate housing quality and performance, playing a crucial role in China’s new urbanization efforts. This aligns with the ultimate goals of prefabrication: energy conservation, emission reduction, pollution mitigation, increased labor productivity, higher quality, and safer buildings that provide better living environments.
Eliminating Rough Construction and Accelerating Housing Quality Improvement through Full Decoration
For over 20 years, the practice of delivering unfinished homes—often referred to as “rough delivery”—has been common in China. The belief that buyers prefer a bare shell to decorate themselves is deeply ingrained. Buyers feel more comfortable customizing and supervising the decoration, while developers see rough delivery as a way to avoid future quality disputes.
However, this “raw material tradition” has introduced many hidden risks. First, during self-decoration, many design and construction needs were overlooked in the original unfinished house. To achieve the desired effects, buyers often undertake significant demolition and modifications to pipelines, equipment, structures, waterproofing, and sometimes even load-bearing walls, beams, and columns. This can cause serious safety hazards and degrade building quality.
Second, repeated demolition and renovation lead to substantial waste of materials, labor, and time. Mountains of construction waste, constant noise, and neighborhood conflicts have become common frustrations for homeowners.
In summary, the rough delivery approach results in inefficient use of resources and severely restricts progress in construction transformation, upgrades, and development.
Some may wonder: although rough delivery has drawbacks, it offers buyers autonomy in decoration. Would a unified full decoration approach lead to a “one size fits all” problem?
This confusion stems from misunderstanding the difference between decoration and finishing.
Decoration actually encompasses many critical engineering elements such as equipment, pipelines, structures, and waterproofing—not just superficial aesthetic improvements.
Full decoration in prefabricated buildings emphasizes industrial production of residential finishes, maximizing on-site assembly, reducing manual labor, and promoting new technologies. It relies on standardized parts and components, contrasting sharply with outdated manual construction methods. Prefabricated construction reduces on-site manual work, with workers following standardized processes, greatly enhancing decoration quality.
Globally, most residential properties in developed countries like those in Europe, the US, and Japan are sold fully decorated, reflecting a high degree of commodification that supports the industrialization of interior construction.
Therefore, factory-assembled decoration methods will strongly drive building industrialization. The ongoing transformation of residential construction—from large-scale building to the continuous improvement of functional quality—will promote sustainable social development.
The Full Decoration Trend Sparks Enormous Potential Across the Decoration Industry Chain
The rise of full decoration has created new growth opportunities for China’s building materials industry while imposing higher standards.
On one hand, the industry must closely align with the demands of prefabricated buildings, integrate upstream and downstream supply chains, and shift from isolated efforts to collaborative innovation. On the other hand, manufacturers must boost technological innovation, respond to market needs, and produce green, integrated building materials tailored for prefabrication.
Currently, national policies are being implemented widely, with local governments actively responding and releasing supportive incentives.
For instance, Zhejiang Province’s Implementation Opinions on Promoting Green Buildings and Industrialized Construction mandate that all new residential buildings on centrally located land must be fully decorated and delivered as finished products. The policy encourages full decoration for ongoing projects, promotes integration of civil engineering and interior design, and fosters prefabricated decoration technology and product development. Zhejiang’s full decoration policy has served as a model for other provinces, accelerating industry-wide benefits.
With full decoration policies advancing, the quality of fully decorated residential buildings is improving rapidly.
Shanghai exemplifies this progress. The Shanghai Municipal Commission of Housing and Urban-Rural Development issued detailed rules for calculating prefabricated building assembly rates, including full decoration and interior industrialization, which has boosted coordinated development. Many real estate companies have adopted industrialized solutions to address common quality issues in full decoration. According to a recent survey, the Shanghai Residential Industrialization Technology Platform achieved an 81.15 satisfaction index among owners of fully decorated units across over 1,000 households in 30 completed projects.
A spokesperson for the Shanghai Residential Industrialization Technology Platform noted in a media interview that since implementing full decoration in prefabricated buildings, many Shanghai projects have shown significant improvements in water leakage, insulation, and soundproofing. A satisfaction survey revealed that in 2016, wall insulation and soundproofing satisfaction rose by 6.44% year-over-year to 82.79%, while door and window insulation and soundproofing satisfaction increased by 4.42% to 84.31%. Through prefabricated concrete (PC) technology, construction errors have been reduced from centimeters to millimeters, effectively mitigating water leakage between walls and windows. PC exterior walls also provide an extra layer of noise filtering compared to traditional walls, integrating insulation and soundproofing for outstanding performance.
Real estate companies have quickly embraced these advancements. For example, Baoye Aiduobang is a PC fully assembled residential community featuring automated assembly line intelligent manufacturing, flexible production, variable space design, interior and exterior industrialization, and BIM application. Similarly, Langshi New West Suburb uses a passive building external suspension installation method for exterior windows and light steel keel partition systems for some interior walls. These are complemented by passive building standards, peripheral protection systems, capillary ceiling radiation, and three-stage filtration full-displacement fresh air systems.
The combination of supportive policies and proactive industry response has accelerated the development of fully decorated homes. This has enabled a wave of innovative building materials technologies to reach ordinary households, benefiting homeowners and consumers as China continues its urbanization journey.
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