Xinghe Yungu Hotel / DJX Design

Architects: DJX Design
Area: 30,000 m²
Year: 2024
Photography: threeimages
Lead Architects: Wang Bing
Architects Team: DJX Design Studio
Design Team: DJX Design Studio
Client: Xinghe Yungu Hotel
City: Xi’an
Country: China

Completed in 2024, Xinghe Yungu Hotel introduces a new hospitality model to Xi’an by positioning itself as an urban micro-retreat rather than a conventional luxury hotel. Designed by DJX Design, the project integrates architecture, interiors, and lighting into a unified spatial narrative centered on water, light, and sensory immersion. Located along the city’s evolving urban axis, the hotel responds to Xi’an’s deep historical context while proposing a contemporary interpretation of Eastern leisure culture. The program combines accommodation, dining, wellness, and social spaces into a vertically layered environment that prioritizes experiential depth over spatial efficiency. Public areas are conceived as immersive environments where structure, material, and illumination shape perception, while guest rooms exceed typical five-star standards in size and function, incorporating private hot spring pools and spaces for extended dwelling. Through its emphasis on bodily experience, temporal suspension, and spatial richness, Xinghe Yungu Hotel reframes luxury as a condition of restoration, intimacy, and sustained engagement with place.

Rather than asking how luxury should appear, Xinghe Yungu Hotel begins by questioning what luxury should accomplish within the contemporary city. In a place such as Xi’an, where historical continuity exerts a constant presence, DJX Design approached the project as a spatial mediator between the physical body and the layered memory of the city. The result is not an icon competing for attention, but an inward-looking environment that encourages withdrawal, recalibration, and heightened awareness of time and sensation.

The architectural massing adheres closely to the site boundaries and prescribed height, allowing gravity and vertical continuity to guide the formal composition. Interlocking volumes generate a grounded entry sequence, while the façade’s rhythm and muted gray tones echo the material restraint of the region. Light was treated as a primary architectural element from the earliest stages of design. Upon entry, illumination emerges from darkness, gradually revealing depth, texture, and scale, and establishing a perceptual transition from the city to an interior world that feels suspended from ordinary time.

Inside, the project follows a principle described by the designers as “grand from afar, refined up close.” Monumental spatial gestures establish a sense of awe, while close-range encounters reveal carefully calibrated material junctions and sensory details. Stone, metal, wood veneer, and textiles are deployed not as symbols of opulence but as instruments for shaping acoustics, tactility, and atmosphere. Public spaces maintain a deliberate tension between monumentality and intimacy, allowing moments of estrangement and curiosity to coexist with comfort.

Water functions as both program and narrative. The spa and bathing areas dissolve conventional distinctions between structure and element, with columns, ceilings, and pools forming continuous vertical and horizontal relationships. The sound, temperature, and movement of water intensify tactile perception, often encouraging guests to disengage visually and experience space through the body. In contrast, ancillary spaces such as changing rooms and showers adopt a restrained palette and minimal detailing, reinforcing clarity and calm through simplicity.

Guest rooms represent a decisive departure from standard hotel planning models. By expanding the base room size and incorporating private hot spring pools, seating platforms, and tea areas, the design prioritizes prolonged occupation and personal ritual. This spatial generosity supports the hotel’s broader ambition to redefine efficiency, valuing experiential richness over maximum yield per square meter.

Xinghe Yungu Hotel ultimately proposes an alternative role for hospitality architecture within dense urban contexts. By merging wellness, social life, and contemplation into a single spatial ecosystem, the project suggests that sustainability can be understood not only through technical performance but through the cultivation of genuine restoration within limited timeframes. In doing so, DJX Design offers a contemporary reinterpretation of Eastern retreat culture, grounded in the realities of modern urban life while deeply attuned to memory, sensation, and place.