The hotel compound comprises of 6 disparate quasi-historic buildings from the 1950’s, with highly decorative roof-eaves, characterful gargoyles and pared-back jack roofs. The question was, “How could we catalogue Chinese architectural heritage, yet not pass them off as genuinely old relics? How to retain the spirit of the “hutong” yet modernise it?”

First, we draped charcoal grey paint onto the buildings to conceptually “fade into the background”, and “catalogued” key architectural details with contemporary gold patina, drawing a distinction between the historical and contemporary.

Second, the traditional “cracked ice-ray” pattern, derived from the imagery of a frozen lake starting to crack, is traditionally used to adorn the open portion of timber doors. We united the buildings, landscape and interiors by taking this 2D pattern, and applied it 3D, to tie the “left-over” spaces in-between each building into a single holistic experience.

VUE is a rare example of adaptive reuse in China. Typically, traditional heritage spaces are either torn down for something brand-new, or preserved as frozen artifacts in time. However, we decided to explore a new possibility: draw from the old but radically update it by recasting it in a new light, to provide a continuum, rather than a mere moment in time.