Suzhou Changyuan Youxiong Hotel

The Changyuan Youxiong Hotel in Suzhou is a collaboration between Suzhou Mingcheng Protection Group and Youxiong Hotel to conserve and adaptively reuse a classical garden heritage. Changyuan, built in the late Qing dynasty at 22 Miaotang Lane in western Suzhou, is a small but exquisitely composed garden of roughly one mu. It had been damaged, restored but never opened, and at the time of the project appeared slightly decayed. Its residential portion on the west had been subdivided and modified; on the east, a separate three-courtyard compound that historically was less closely tied to the garden had, by proximity, become spatially inseparable from it. That compound had most recently been used as offices. The east-west bays were narrow, and the north-south circulation spine between the three courtyards ate much of the usable floor area. The buildings range from a traditional timber gatehouse of the 1980s to brick-concrete pitched-roof blocks of the 1980s and 1990s, and all are subject to strict heritage controls, especially the garden gables and courtyards, which may not be altered. The design strategy is to exploit the small, south, middle and north courtyards and the existing gates through to Changyuan's covered walkway: the former internal corridor of the east compound is abolished, so that all guests walk through the garden to reach their rooms, passing first through the courtyards and then into the walkways. This treats the garden and courtyards as lived experience rather than visual scenery. Privacy is achieved through an added inner lightwell in the southernmost gatehouse room, plantings and rockeries in the other courtyards, and a fence along the north court. To reconcile the different interiors of old timber and modern concrete buildings, a secondary timber beam grid is inserted inside, modulating partitions, scale and atmosphere; visitors walk around or between the columns much as they would in an old timber building, producing a bodily familiarity, and the simpler furnishings can then harmonize the whole.