The project is located in Moon Bay Scenic Area, Jing County, Xuancheng City, Anhui Province. It is a Hui-style building on the Sichuan-Tibet Line in southern Anhui. Moon Bay is a river formed by dozens of streams. In recent years, it has become popular for its wild and pleasant waterfront tour experience, and is favored by travel enthusiasts from surrounding provinces and cities.
The building is a self-built rural house with a brick-concrete structure, which originally had 18 small guest rooms. The owner hopes to comprehensively upgrade the facade, spatial layout, and interior of the original "family hotel" type building. We hope to inject some local characteristics and emotional experience into the space while meeting the basic functional requirements.
Ink and wash, rice paper, Maolin brick
The black tiles and white walls of the Hui style are just like ink and wash, and Jing County is famous for producing rice paper. At the beginning of the design, we naturally thought of incorporating such artistic conception into the concept. However, compared with the common use of black and white tones, we hope that the translation of ink and wash and rice paper here will not only be elegant, but also more lively and freehand.
Maolin tiles are a unique decorative material for the interior and exterior walls of ancient buildings in Jing County. They are also a gift from local traditional craftsmen: the most striking feature of the tiles is that there are two colors of black and white on the same brick, and the black color is like green tone ink, while the white color is almost in gray tone, the two tones form ever-changing abstract graphics, with vivid charm, and have the artistic conception and beauty of landscape paintings. The neutralizing effect between the two-color establishes the unique feature of the material. In addition, due to its special raw materials, the tiles are strong and lightweight, resistant to alkali and acid, do not stain with dust, do not crack, and can resist corrosion and degeneration. It is a very ideal decorative material.
The ancients and the craftsmen of Jing County today are better at using decorative tiles on the outer surface of Hui-style buildings. In this design, we try to combine it with modern material technology such as fluted glass and DuPont paper, integrate it into the interior, and form a dialogue between "ink" and "rice paper", so that the space has both the poetic charm of traditional Chinese landscape painting and the temperament of modern abstract art.
“Vitality”
The south side of the building faces a highway, and beyond that, a series of mountains. This is also the entrance for the visitors. To the north, a more lively and dynamic view unfolds with the river. During peak season, the water is filled with inflatable rafts and children playing joyfully. Guests can enjoy refreshments in the ground floor common area, dine in the basement restaurant, or walk through the waterside courtyard to play by the river. Through careful interior design, guest rooms on both the north and south sides offer window views of either the mountains or the river. A rooftop terrace provides additional leisure space, allowing the public areas to flow throughout the entire guesthouse.
The public space of the B&B is designed to break down the barriers of daily life, allowing guests from different regions, backgrounds, ages, and personalities to live together and integrate under the same roof. They can find their own corner to be alone, and can also communicate with strangers without restraint. Therefore, this place is full of vitality and inclusiveness: the floorplan adopts a pure enclosed structure, and sofas of different sizes and shapes are set along the wall, thus creating a diverse interactive scene, allowing everyone to find a comfortable corner.
Decorative tiles and Dupont paper, small decorative tiles and native wood, different materials collide freely, leaving the greatest freedom for visitors to explore. The furniture is made of rough wood and bamboo weaving, and does not pursue exquisite corners and edges. Instead, the uncarved natural beauty is more valuable here. Compared with the stereotyped industrial process "products", we hope that this place will present the state of careful care and constant change by the homestay owner: although not perfect, it is full of vitality.
Gather parts into a whole, one room one experience
After partial reconstruction and optimization of the floorplan, the original 18 guest rooms are merged and adjusted into 14 rooms with a new layout. These more than ten rooms are distributed on the four floors of the building from bottom to top. Since one side of the building faces the river and the village, and the other side is close to the road and the mountains, the rooms on different floors and directions have completely different external conditions. In addition, the owner of the homestay demands for the diversity of product functions: almost every room is given a different character:
The two old guest rooms on the second floor are combined into a family suite. While ensuring that the space is open and transparent, the height difference in the room implies the dynamic and static divisions, dividing the living and bedroom spaces, and enriching the vertical experience. The two original terraces are combined into one to form a strip-shaped corridor. By raising the tatami in the bedroom area and the sofa in the living room, a strip-shaped ocean ball pool and slide area are naturally formed.
The third-floor guest rooms are slightly adjusted the layout of tatami and bathtub to avoid the negative sight of the dilapidated self-built house on the opposite mountain; the fourth floor is combined with the public terrace to set up a gray space extending outward, blurring the boundary between indoor and outdoor; the north-facing guest rooms are more concerned with the interaction with the stream.
“New life gestation”
We do not want this project to become a stereotyped travel stop, it should be rooted and grown in this land: the rebirth of Yujian Boutique hotel is not only a reshaping of architecture, but also an exploration and practice of locality and publicity. Space is a container of local cultural skills, superimposed with its context in modern travel. In return, locality also gives space irreplaceable differences and unique experiences.
Compared with the guest rooms, we believe that the public attributes of a boutique hotel are equally important. Therefore, we have reserved more areas for flexibilities and set up space factors that can stimulate the curiosity of users. In fact, we have reserved space for "possibilities" and created conditions for them. We hope that every guest who chooses to stay here during their journey can find the reason and motivation to start again.
