Hospitality Design - January/February 2012 - 81

Opposite page: The InterContinental Sanya features screens inspired by mathematical tiling patterns (photo by Patrick Bingham-Hall). This photo: City meets resort at the InterContinental Sanya (photo by Patrick Bingham-Hall). Right: The striking entrance to Chynna at Hilton Beijing Wangfujing.
business in China. And ﬁnally: there continues to be an increasing demand within China for these hotels.” Tom Schmidt, managing director of Hong Kong-based Sepia Design Consultants, who is currently working on the second phase of the Resort Horizon, a domestic brand located in Changbaishan, adds: “In some provinces, it appears there are mandates from the national and local governments to actively increase tourism in speciﬁc areas and to expand the economic base. Hotel developments—and speciﬁcally major hotel brands—are often sought out to kick-start tourism.”

Brand Power
Hotel owners and operators are responding aggressively: according to Lodging Econometrics Q3 reports, there are some 400,000 rooms on the horizon for China. This past November, Marriott signed its 100th hotel in China with the JW Marriott in Shenyang, with plans to open a new property every month for the next three years. Starwood, long a player in the country with the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel Beijing opening in 1985, has almost 100 properties on the boards, and in 2011, the company opened a new hotel in China every two weeks. “China is about sixty percent of Starwood Asia Paciﬁc’s growth pipeline,” says Miguel Ko, chairman and president of Starwood Asia Paciﬁc Hotels & Resorts. Starwood is now focusing on second- and third-tiered cities as well as resort locations, since it already has an established presence in the gateway cities. “As our Sheraton brand is historically the ‘pioneering’ brand into new markets, we will continue to leverage it and also bring our eight other brands in shortly after.” Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts sees itself doubling its existing number of hotel rooms in China within the next few years. As it is also a trusted name in the country’s key and secondary cities, its plans include projects in developing destinations such as Nanjing, Jinan, Nanchang, Lhasa, Diqing, Sanya, and Dalian. InterContinental Hotels Group also has its sights set on cities outside traditional hubs with the launch of an upscale China-speciﬁc chain in the ﬁnal stages of brand development. destination, many say it is also expected to house the country’s retirement community. “There is a lot of work in Hainan,” says J Lee Rofkind, director of Buz Design and the outgoing AIA Hong Kong chapter president, who is currently designing an eco-lodge in Yunnan based on an early form of Buddhism. “Cities with twenty-story towers are being built in former jungles. There is nowhere else in the country with that kind of yearround climate. It will be the next Florida.” Singapore-based WOHA recently completed the InterContinental Sanya, located on the southern part of Hainan. “[It] was interesting as it was a resort site, which was almost in the city, so the hotel had aspects of both,” explains Richard Hassell, WOHA’s founding director. “We tried to create a boutique feel in a much larger hotel—every bathroom, for instance, has a sea or garden courtyard view. We aimed to make an interior that a foreigner would feel looked Chinese, but [that someone] Chinese would feel had a contemporary feel. The lobby screens were based on a mathematical tiling pattern, but there is a certain Chinese quality in the proportions. Other elements we used were the local Hainan hill tribe textiles, which have strong geometric designs.” RTKL, which has recently worked on such projects as the W Beijing and Grand Hyatt Shenzhen, has been busy with the Grand Hyatt

Life’s a Beach
The resort island of Hainan is enjoying exponential growth due not only to a recent push for development by the central government, but also its abundant sandy coastlines—and besides being a perfect tourist

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Hospitality Design - January/February 2012