A courtyard-style hot spring resort hotel has opened in a creative aesthetic park off Beijing’s North Fifth Ring Road.
Emotional Prologue
Architecture, interior and landscape are all designed by Soong Lab+.
Coloratus Bar, located on the second floor of the hotel room zone, is the first small experience space completed in the whole project. It is showing its vitality with unique tension. The staircase leading to the bar entrance connects the main corridor of the hotel rooms, and also leads directly to the hot spring area.
The characteristic of this moving line makes the operation of the bar flexible and diversified, which can not only serve the guests of the hotel in the future, but also can open to the public at a specific time.
The mood of red brings original vitality
Red is one of the earliest colors recognized and used by humans. Layers of red sediment on the rock are from time immemorial; Cave men used to sprinkle dark red hematite powder at the sacrificial ceremony; Stone Age ancestors painted pottery with red paint to celebrate light. The Liangzhou red flower in ancient Chinese books explains the romantic nature of red… But now, when we talk about red, it’s not just about the material, it’s also about the emotions.
Primitive vitality is the mood of ‘red’. Soong Lab+ takes ‘red’ as the design theme of Coloratus Bar, hoping to stimulate the wild energy of the place from the inside out through the abstract emotion concept, and guide visitors to explore the correlation between the space, emotion expression and themselves. Meanwhile, it takes this place as the prologue for the beginning of everything.
Between finite and infinite tension
The original site of this bar has plenty of height space with some high windows, but the area is almost a narrow passage. In this limited and special plan, how to construct a rich experience, while expressing the emotional concept of ‘red’, are the questions that the director Wang Songtao needs to think about and sort out.
By adding floors and controlling scales, the original site ‘grows’ into a double-storey space with a small double height area. At the end of the first floor is a staircase hall, which serves as a vertical passage between the two floors.
The staircase hall adopts plenty of metal tubes through ordered arrangement to form an ‘screen’, which not only ensures the safety of passage, but also provides a special pass experience. Under the shelter of this ‘screen’, visitors complete the emotional transformation from the first floor to the second, that is, from a quiet space to an expansive area, feeling abundant natural light and a wide view.
Location Beijing, China
Area 400 sqm
Design Soong Lab+
Lead architect Songtao Wang
Photos courtesy Wu Ang
Soong Lab+
Soong Lab+, founded in 2013 in Beijing by Songtao Wang and Jane Zhang, is a design firm that aims at exploring the relationship between lifestyle and living experience in diversified forms. Soong Lab+ builds a dialogue between people and place through continuous design practice, and realizes the possibility of symbiosis between nature, humanity and area by the communication and collaboration with professionals rooted in different files.
Soong Lab+ respects the consideration of the essence of things, pays attention to the values and starting points of design, and does not blindly follow the style, form and feeling from the public view. Keep the passion, curiosity and sensitivity of life, emphasize the attitude of creation, adhere to do real design.
