Dwellings | Chengdu: A Resting Place Above the City

The moment the lift doors open, the glitter of Chunxi Road is left outside.

The hotel occupies floors 39 to 41 of Yinshi Plaza in Chengdu, beside the Chunxi Road shopping district: 2,100 square metres. Facing a fixed building shell, designer Heddy Huang of Meidao Interior Design chose not to touch the existing structure, and instead laid a quiet atmosphere over this high place with colour, texture and intangible-heritage craft. In the lounge are several pieces from Dak Haan.

The lobby is laid out in camel and coffee tones, like mountains at dusk, its edges drawn by black square-tiled walls. The reception desk, hand-drawn and custom-made by Huang, combines travertine-effect plaster with marble and antique bronze. From the centre of the dome hangs a hemispherical installation the designer calls the "Healing Planet": it covers what was once a stiff ring of light strips, turning a constraint into a focal point.

What Huang wanted was for every guest who comes through the door to grow calm in mind before body.

Past the lobby, a woven-bamboo peony three metres across blooms quietly. Every strip of it was made by Song Liangliang, an inheritor of Chengdu bamboo craft: choosing the bamboo, scraping, splitting and weaving, dozens of steps over more than a month.

Beneath the flower sits a Dak Haan Half-Hundred% Lounge Chair. Someone who has just arrived can sit here for a moment, set down their bags and look up at the flower. Half-Hundred% is a 2021 design by Zhou Anbin: the skeleton that usually hides inside a sofa is brought into the open, with straps woven into seat and back and crossed panels for a base. The weave of the straps and the weave of the bamboo meet here.

Through black doors is the restaurant. A huge woven-bamboo cloud, "Spirit Cloud", floats beneath the dome; on the walls hang two bamboo-filament works by Chengdu artist Ling Qianya and a terracotta-red appliqué on linen. The black dining chairs are by Zhiyin, a Chinese designer furniture brand. In a corner sits a discarded old chair that Song Liangliang has re-covered in bamboo weaving and named "Wasted Effort".

The designer says this is not a hotel that stays the same: next time, perhaps another heritage craft will have moved in.

For the lounge, Huang insisted on furniture from Chinese designer brands only: Zhiyin's black leather three-seater sofa and round coffee table, and Dak Haan's Half-Hundred% Lounge Chairs, black side table and black lounge chair. The two brands differ in style, one wrapping the body in leather, the other holding a sitter on woven straps, like two strangers who end up at the same table because they think alike.

Beside the Half-Hundred% at the window is a black Gudun Side Table. Gudun takes after the stone stools of the street; Zhou Anbin broke the form apart and reassembled it in 2022, keeping the casual sense that anyone can sit on it or set something down. Here it is tucked beside the chair to hold a cup of tea or a phone, so you can sit for a while facing the city outside.

The black curved-back armchair by the window, beside the light column, is a Xiaoyuan Lounge Chair. Xiaoyuan is a 2020 design by Zhou Anbin, named for Xiaoyuan Xincun, the neighbourhood where he lived. The body of the chair closes round you from both sides, the back leans slightly away, and once you sit down you simply loosen. As Huang puts it, the pieces of a healing space should not be standard parts from a production line; at the moment a guest sits down, the body knows best whether it is comfortable.

Rather than the familiar white and grey of wabi-sabi, Huang went towards the dark: camel, coffee, black and cave-like textures. In a busy shopping district, these heavier colours give a surprising sense of being held and safe.

The most moving moments often happen by the window. After a long day, lie in the bath beside the glass with a sachet of herbs, the lights of Taikoo Li and the outline of IFS outside.

Good design need not be dramatic. Sometimes it is simply a chair, set in a gap in the city, where people can stop.