Artyzen NEW BUND 31: Neri&Hu's Garden Sanctuary in Shanghai
Artyzen NEW BUND 31 Shanghai offers an unusual idea of luxury within Qiantan's high-rise urban landscape: a hotel that places the experience of refuge at the centre of its interior design. Neri&Hu designed the project's public interiors and guestrooms as a sequence of spaces carved from an imagined stone mass. The hotel forms part of a larger development that includes a performing arts centre, offices and retail; its design responds to the unusual opportunity to connect cultural and hospitality programmes directly.
Arrival as a journey through different scales
Rather than lead every guest immediately to a conventional ground-floor reception desk, the hotel stages arrival across several levels. Visitors enter a relatively intimate lobby at street height, pass a lounge connected to the adjacent performing arts centre on level three, and eventually reach the main reception and public amenities on the fifth-floor podium. The sequence makes the building feel like a small vertical landscape rather than a single anonymous tower.
At ground level, the facade has a subtly textured concrete surface whose scalloped pattern echoes architectural features of the neighbouring performance venue. A high opening in the southern wall brings daylight into the entry room, changing the atmosphere of what might otherwise be a fully enclosed stone volume. The experience is one of moving from compression towards openness.
A garden podium above the city
On level five, reception, restaurants, lounges, a tapas bar, event venues and planted outdoor areas are arranged across an elevated podium. Neri&Hu describes these spaces as a continuous stone landscape into which individual destinations have been carved. Pavilion-like volumes mark different uses, encouraging guests to move through the level rather than remain in one central lounge.
The garden terraces give the public interiors a rare connection to open air in this dense district. They are not simply decorative edges around a hotel pool: their presence affects circulation, views, seating and the way neighbouring rooms are occupied. The design establishes an atmosphere of respite by combining solid stone surfaces with vegetation, natural light and a controlled sequence of architectural thresholds.
The hotel room as a private enclosure
The 202 guestrooms continue the idea of nature as refuge, but at a smaller, domestic scale. Neri&Hu wraps the central part of each room in light plaster, contrasting with the grey stone mass of the entrance and bathroom. A timber bed platform and headboard introduce warmth, while discreet bronze details lend a crafted finish to the restrained palette.
The studio also developed bespoke furniture for the rooms. The pieces are intended to feel as though they belong to the architecture, rather than being added as unrelated decorative objects. Their clear forms support the sense of domestic familiarity that a guest might seek while staying in a dense urban environment.
Hospitality linked to cultural life
The hotel's adjacency to the performing arts centre is fundamental to its urban identity. The two buildings bring different rhythms into contact: cultural events attract crowds and evening activity, while hotel rooms and planted terraces provide moments of calm. The design embraces this contrast, creating a series of spaces where collective life can give way to individual privacy.
The result is a contemporary hotel that finds its character in architecture and landscape rather than applied themes. The stone language unifies public spaces, the gardens introduce softness and seasonal change, and the guestrooms reduce the concept to a carefully edited material palette. These elements allow the project to express the idea of sanctuary without removing it from Shanghai.
Project details and photography
Project: Urban Sanctuary | Artyzen NEW BUND 31 Shanghai, No. 20, 666 West Haiyang Road, Pudong New District, Shanghai, China. Interiors, product and graphic design: Neri&Hu Design and Research Office. Gross area: 17,090 m². Guestrooms: 202. Completed: October 2023. Photography: Pedro Pegenaute, whose name appears in each of the official project photograph filenames selected here.
Comments