Siyuan's Nest (Environment Design)

Been working on a character/environment design exercise for the past few months, based on China during the rule of Wu Zetian (~600 AD).
This is the environment design for Siyuan, one of the characters I developed for this drawing exercise.

And this being pretty much my first time making a fully realized environment design and paintover, I went through quite a few steps to get to something I was happy with.
So I though I'd share every step of my process (which is still evolving of course) in the hopes that some people will find it useful in some way.