Abstract: The comprehensive promotion of rural revitalization has shifted the rural residents' demand for residential buildings from ‘survival type' to ‘quality type'. As a traditional vernacular building spontaneously formed by the people, residential buildings are an important carrier of rural traditional culture and have great research space and potential. From the perspective of human settlement environmental science, this study aims to explore the influencing factors and optimization strategies of the livability of stone houses in Pingtan. Through in-depth interviews and grounded theory research methods, it sorts out the categories of spatial perception, group differences, spatial functions, decision-making environment, and environmental quality, and forms a typical relationship structure that affects the main categories of the livability of traditional rural residential buildings.The study finds that ‘spatial perception' can be used as the core category to connect and dominate other main categories to form a complete story line, thus constructing an optimization strategy for the livability of traditional rural dwellings, that is, the composite design of space functions to improve the overall utilization of space, the internal and external environment renovation of residential buildings to improve the safety, rationality, and comfort, gathering of diverse groups to drive changes in rural society, spatial quality, and structure, policy guidance of rewards instead of subsidies to build a dynamic planning development path of rural residential. This study proposes the optimization strategies of residential livability, could further improve the spatial quality of rural residential buildings, in order to achieve the integrated development of urban and rural areas.