Zuixihu Restaurant

S5 Design designed the transformation of nature and art at the Zuixihu Restaurant, allowing guests to experience service and indulge in food at the same time.

Firm
  • area / size 9,472 sqft
  • Year 2022
  • Location Hangzhou, China,
  • Type Restaurant,
  • The integration of the contemporary and the oriental should not be confined to the grafting of traditional elements or the superficial interpretation of symbols, but rather breaking through the simplicity of forms and returning to the core of spiritual culture, integrating and mapping people’s lifestyles and artistic pursuits nowadays. At Zuixihu Restaurant, the designers have taken local landscape and characteristic culture into contemporary design to produce a special work with local charm.

    Blending traditional humanistic elements into a modern constructed order, in which the designer uses figurative patterns that can convey more historical information, the atmosphere is effectively conveyed and the texture and colours of the space are expressed in a more subtle way. There are often figurative parts in a space, which help to give a more intuitive sense of tradition and history.

    The designer deconstructs and reconstructs the figurative part so that it forms a graphic base, and then adds textures that express an intermediate status between abstraction and figuration, which are also reinterpretations and reconstructions of traditional materials.

    In visual art, image is the form and idea is the content. Abstract art is visual art focusing on subjective concepts, while figural art is objective existence. Integrate the object into the subject and integrate abstract art into figural art. The dining spaces are designed by the concept of a mid-lake pavilion on the Wests Lake, creating an ambience of waterscape.

    Entering through the entrance, landscapes change, to experience the transition from boating, playing with water and dining. The square space framed by timber and surrounded on three sides is the mid-lake pavilion shaped by the designer’s abstract concept. Four pavilions are built near the water, with each angle and screen used to build an abstract Jiangnan Garden experience that combines the real with the virtual.

    The idea of the dining area comes from the mid-lake pavilion, full of Jiangnan atmosphere, while echoing the texture of the lamps and partitions, producing a kind of beauty of reality and fiction. The designer attempts to present the ancient and the modern, the present and the traditional in figure ground. Here, a traditional pavilion layout is used, with layers of space, and oriental aesthetic techniques such as oppositive scenery, enframed scenery and end scenery are used to create a dramatic effect, with the traditional pavilion as the base and modern materials highlighted, as figure grounds for each other.

    The overall colour of the space is in keeping with the hall, with vermilion and beige colours taken from the Song painting ‘Listening to the Qin’, matched with some orange and red ornaments, both ancient and elegant, the vermilion and beige colours are sharp and refreshing, giving a sense of calmness. Oriental interest melts into modernity, serenity in the air, subtlety and refinement coexist.

    In the private dining room, an oriental vision is used to interpret meeting function, using nature to create a contemporary order, enriching the unimaged creative inspiration to break down oriental compositions and achieve interaction between spaces.

    Natural light enters from the balanced and stable glass doors and windows behind the long table, without blocking the principles and laws of things, naturally living in the space, where people come and go, and the unchanging narrative lives on.

    Time flies, but what remains are the things that have undergone sedimentation and still keep with the fashion, which is the inherited oriental culture, the natural spirit, the fusion of design and contemporary thinking and innovation.

    Design: S5 Design
    Design Director: Daniel Fan
    Photography: Tan Xiao