AB Concept Turns Spago Shanghai into a Sequence of Dining Rooms
A restaurant with a skyline view has an obvious temptation: make the city do all the work. Spago Shanghai poses a more interesting design question. What should happen before diners turn towards the windows?
Located on the 21st floor of The St. Regis on the Bund, the restaurant looks towards the Bund and Pudong. Marriott describes a Californian culinary identity, developed by Wolfgang Puck’s team with local seasonal ingredients. AB Concept is responsible for the interiors. Rather than presenting this as an opening announcement, this feature examines the design documented in the studio’s June 2026 release.
A literary starting point
AB Concept identifies John Jacob Astor IV’s 1894 novel A Journey in Other Worlds as its conceptual reference. The route through the restaurant connects an entrance, lounge and bar, main dining room, private room and terrace.
Read as a design strategy, that sequence is more useful than a literal illustration of a book. Each threshold can change the relationship between the individual diner and the larger room. Arrival calls for orientation; a bar encourages sociability; a private table requires a different degree of enclosure. The architectural question is whether a shared identity can survive those shifts without every space looking the same.
Contrasting surfaces, different scales
The studio describes alabaster at the entrance, alongside marble, bronze and timber details. At the bar, fluted glass and mirrors meet velvet seating. The main dining space includes an open kitchen, while fabric panels appear in the private dining room. Bronze-framed doors lead to a terrace with coloured-glass elements and draped textiles.
The contrast suggests a way to think about restaurant luxury beyond the expense of individual materials. Reflective and soft surfaces do different jobs in a composition. One catches attention; another provides a visual pause. A successful interior needs both, particularly when the setting already competes with a large urban panorama.
Keeping the city in the composition
The hotel’s dining page positions Spago as a rooftop restaurant with a river-facing terrace and California-inspired food. Its location places the dining experience within the larger geography of the Huangpu River rather than an entirely self-contained interior world.
For this project, the strongest editorial reading is not that decoration replaces the view, but that the transition towards it matters. The terrace becomes the final change of setting in a larger sequence. That is a more compelling proposition than treating the skyline as a backdrop for a single photograph.
Project details
Project: Spago Shanghai. Interior design: AB Concept. Location: The St. Regis on the Bund, Shanghai, 538 Zhongshan Dong Er Road, Huangpu District. This is a source-based design feature, not an on-site restaurant review. Material and spatial descriptions are attributed to the studio; service quality and the experience of the completed space have not been independently tested.
Sources
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