Hengshan is where the heart is

A view of a Courtyard Room at the hotel. Photos provided to China Daily

Hotel profile | Shanghai

The new Shanghai hotel from Starwood's Luxury Collection has the charm of a bespoken designer home. Matthew Fulco reports.

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The bold, terracotta-dressed facade of Twelve At Hengshan rises dramatically over its quaint namesake road in Shanghai's former French Concession, imbued with the monumental sensibility of a great civic space dedicated to the arts.

Yet what appears to be a museum of contemporary art or theater is actually a striking new five-story, 171-room hotel, which, once you step inside, looks and feels like a utilitarian designer residence clean lines, clutter-free, neutral color palette and hip mood lighting that's bright enough for reading. Guest room terraces with lush garden views "bring nature inside". It's more like Hong Kong's New Territories than Shanghai - all that's missing is the ocean.

"When I step inside, I feel not that I am walking into a hotel lobby but that I am entering an elaborate villa," general manager David Katamopoulos says. "The hotel has the capabilities of a large property but with a limited number of rooms to maintain an intimate feel."

Twelve At Hengshan's marriage of aesthetics and functionality comes courtesy of the prolific Italian architect Mario Botta, renowned for his work on iconic public buildings like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Samsung Museum of Modern Art in Seoul, as well as residential projects in Europe, the United States and Japan.

"I would like to make an architecture that responds to real needs," Botta told Perspecta, Yale University's Journal of Architecture, in 1983. "The dwelling as the repository of mankind must offer a micro-climate of life to enhance social communication, as well as eating, love-making and working," he said, adding that "the proposal of lavish artificial paradises" has "somewhat distorted and modified" those needs.

Nearly 30 years later, Botta has stayed true to his vision, designing the first residential-style retreat in the heart of Shanghai's historic downtown, where zoning regulations restrict new construction. The neighborhood surrounding the hotel contains one-third of Shanghai's top historical monuments, among them, many freestanding villa homes dating from the mid-19th century to the 1940s with luxuriant gardens, according to Twelve At Hengshan.