Dwellings | Xi'an: Qimen, A Table of Rare Flavours

A hot pot dinner is often the longest meal a table will see. The broth boils and is topped up, things go in and are fished out, and people lean forward to reach, then sit back to talk. When you sit that long, the chair becomes the thing you rely on most.

Qimen's first seafood hot pot restaurant opened in Xi'an in midsummer 2023: 1,000 square metres, designed by Choosen Sight (CSD). The Hong and Xuanwu Chairs around the round tables of its private rooms, and the Xuanwu Chairs at the square table of the red room, come from Dak Haan.

Choosen Sight set out to bring the culture and gardens of Jiangnan, China's south, into an ancient northern capital. As the designers describe it, the space is arranged as a garden walk: in through the gate, across the courtyard, up into the hall and on to the terrace, the rooms growing larger along the way as the mood slowly opens.

In a space like this, everything has been considered: screens, partitions, blinds, water and light. What is left to the furniture is the last and most practical thing: you walk into a private room, pull out a chair and sit down, and you stay a long time.

The front hall is dark; a vase of branches and a long red table hold your steps first. The corridor narrows, light spreading low along it bit by bit, and only at its end do the private rooms begin.

The rooms are divided by screens, blinds and glass with rattan sealed inside: light passes through, figures do not. In a restaurant organised around a walk through a garden, the private room is the place where you stop.

Around the table in this room are Dak Haan's Hong Chairs.

Zhang Shiqi designed the Hong Chair in 2022. Two smooth lengths of bent wood curve into an arc, running from the back to the arms, like a rainbow among the clouds; hong means rainbow. At Qimen, its back and seat are warm red in one room and dark in another.

At hot pot, people rarely sit upright. They lean forward to pick something out, sit back to talk, and often rest an elbow on the arm. The Hong Chair carries back and arm in the same curve of wood, so there is something there when you lean back and something to hold when you get up. Its lines are light; a full circle of them still doesn't crowd the room.

The Hong Chair is not Dak Haan's only chair at Qimen. Judging from the designers' published photographs, the round tables in the rooms under the skylit grid ceiling and along the dark walls are mostly ringed with Hong Chairs; in another room, also hung with a ring chandelier, the chairs around the round table are Dak Haan's Xuanwu Chairs. In the red room, with its red wall and single square table, the chairs are Xuanwu too.

The Xuanwu Chair is as old as Dak Haan itself. Zhou Anbin founded the brand in 2020, and from 8 to 11 September that year he took part, for the first time in his own name, in the REd Design Exhibition in Shanghai, organised by the Shanghai Furniture Association within the Modern Shanghai Fashion & Home Show at the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition & Convention Center in Pudong; the Xuanwu Chair was the first piece he designed for it. That year's theme was "scale". As he saw it, designing is itself a matter of judging scale: the dimensions and proportions of the object, the tastes of the public against a designer's own language, and whether a factory can actually make the thing, in quantity. The Xuanwu Chair was measured out between those scales.

The first idea came from the beam-and-column structure of traditional Chinese architecture: the four legs were the columns, and the seat, like a dougong bracket, rested on four crossbeams lapped over one another. But as the design developed, the right-angled joinery of the building was softened little by little, and the way a body meets a chair had to be considered too, until the seat had become a smooth, tortoise-shell form. The original source blurred, so the chair simply took the name Xuanwu, the Black Tortoise.

Timber for the bones, rattan or fabric for the flesh: it looks like a body with both, and it sits more comfortably for it. The frame is North American ash, and the chair measures 590 × 560 × 760 mm. In the red room, the dark frames hold their own against all that red; in the round-table room, a ring of Xuanwu Chairs closes around a large table. Once you sit down, the frame holds your back and sides, and however long the banquet runs, you stay settled.

At a banquet the food is the lead, and so are the people; the chair only has to keep them seated. When people can stay seated, the table breaks up slowly.