The Emperor

The designer darling of Hollywood celebrities such as Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lopez, Graft is not so much design practice as a German movement that is spreading its wings over the world.

Founding partners Lars Krukeberg, Wolfram Putz and Thomas Willemeit started Graft in 1998 as a laboratory to push the boundaries of design in an inclusive, multidisciplinary way. After all, it credits Brad Pitt as an integral part of its projects with him, and lists his name on its project team credits even though, technically, he is its client. Many of its projects are unrealised, yet they garner just as much attention for their slick renderings.

With offices in Los Angeles (responsible for Tangerine Club at Treasure Island, Las Vegas), Berlin (responsible for Hotel Q in Berlin) and Beijing (responsible for The Emperor), Graft has the globe covered. For The Emperor, it was all about location, location, location. Steps away from The Forbidden City, the design concept begs to be palatial-inspired. The execution, however, is something completely refreshing.

The Emperor is petite at 4,800m2 spread over three storeys, with a basement and a roof terrace. The building is the former Qinghua University Alumni Club with the Ning He temple from the Qing Dynasty as its immediate neighbour. Graft turned the rectangular box form into a white massing, which it then carved a series of functional spaces it dubs as the first “rough cut”. Further chipping away at the block is in the addition of a series of carvings in the form of suede striations that meander through all the spaces, zigzagging up and down the different levels to link the variety of architectural elements into a cohesive whole.
As in many Beijing brick-clad hutongs, The Emperor contains a central courtyard connecting two buildings on the ground level. Graft distilled the courtyard function to its essence, turning it into a waiting area that invites conversation. Within the building diagonally opposite the courtyard is the reception, which consists of a long desk with a secondary lounge area facing it.

Rather than waste any precious square footage, Graft programmed the guestrooms on the ground, second and third floors, leaving the basement and roof terrace to sandwich the public areas of restaurant, bar, shop, meeting spaces and wellness retreat with spa. The striation begins in the lobby as bench seating, then snakes up the wall to become display shelving for tourist information, then flattens to a graphic pattern as it enters the guestroom corridors. Here, the ribbon morphs into a linear depiction of Beijing’s history, with nodes in the form of flat screen televisions and “sound caves” giving pause to guests with its strains of Chinese opera.

Instead of room numbers, each of the 55 guestrooms and suites features an abstract portrait of a previous emperor as its marker, continuing the striation as it progresses through the various Chinese dynasties. Within the rooms, the striation turns into the horizontal planes of desk and sofa, finally culminating in the bed. An imprint of The Forbidden City’s rooflines continues from the suede striation onto the glass-enclosed bathrooms. Black tiled bathrooms are juxtaposed against the predominantly white interiors with their white Corian sink and vanity counter. The colour of the graphic ribbons, too, changes from floor to floor; they shift from lime green to orange to teal as the eye reads a continuous dialogue that evolves throughout the entire property.
The Emperor’s signature restaurant is Shi, located in the basement. With an entrance that leads down from the hotel’s central staircase, Shi also offers its own entrance independent of the hotel via two wide staircases.

Fusion cuisine courtesy of John Hao is on the menu, with the restaurant zoned into three sections: a ‘Western’ area with booth seating, a central bar and pivot point for food service and an ‘Eastern’ area with daybeds and central sofa with integrated fireplace.

At the opposite end, rooftop bar Yin is on one side of the large terrace while wellness retreat and spa Yue takes up the balance of the space. It includes a tranquil reflecting pond, massage rooms and elevated Jacuzzi with a panoramic 360-degree view of the city.
Palatial, indeed.

The Emperor
33 Qihelou Street, Dongcheng District
100006 Beijing
People’s Republic of China
Tel: +8610 6526 5566
www.designhotels.com
www.theemperor.com.cn
Rooms: 55 guestrooms and suites
Food:    Shi fusion restaurant and bar
Drink:    Yin bar
Leisure:    Yue Spa and Wellness Area
Facilities:    3 meeting rooms, Jing Chinese             arts and crafts boutique