Moon River

Moon River Reflection is a 233-square-metre bed-and-breakfast renovation on the 25th floor of a riverside residential tower in the Jiangshan Tianxia development in Chongqing's Nan'an District, developed by Jiegui (Chongqing) Hotel Management and designed by Li Zhe, Chen Yunfei and Shen Yifan. The apartment faces Chaotianmen, where the Yangtze and Jialing rivers meet, directly across from the monumental Raffles City. The original unit is a two-elevator, three-bedroom, two-living-room layout with a six-metre double-height living room; the owner bought the entire floor and, after considering existing pipe runs and room sizes, converted everything except the dining area into seven guest rooms, one of which is a duplex. The floor-to-ceiling windows wrap twelve metres around the corner and the six-metre balcony opens directly to the view, so the designers' main move was simply to remove redundant partitions. Only one entrance is kept, and the two dining rooms are knocked together into a near-forty-square-metre public room with a bar and breakfast area, organised around a long central table that forces guests on a loop before reaching their rooms, producing a rhythmic sequence. The project's signature gesture is the staircase to the duplex bedroom, which the designers placed on the six-metre balcony rather than inside. Taking Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River on a fire escape in Breakfast at Tiffany's as their cue, they turned two landings into picture frames aimed at Chaotianmen, offering different angles and poses for guests to photograph. The outdoor stair becomes a place of poetic pause: the dialogue with the view, the stepped seats and the warm touch of wood turn a generic river-view Airbnb into a stage on which every guest can perform, moving Guy Debord's society of the spectacle from passive consumption into active participation. The staircase gathers sky, earth, divinity and the everyday back together on the 25th floor, giving travellers a way to re-sense the world around them.