Chengdu’s Temple House Hotel

If you are familiar with The Opposite House in Beijing and The Upper House in Hong Kong, you will like the new Temple House hotel in Chengdu, China. The small-scale hotel, featuring 100 rooms and 42 apartments, is a very interesting part of the local government’s conservation project to preserve heritage buildings next to the thousand-year-old Daci Temple.

The new Temple House Hotel is unusual by any standard. Make Architects designed it with a three-dimensional woven façade that combines modern design with the traditional Chengdu architectural elements of timber, brick and step stones.

Elegant bamboo trees frame the hotel’s entrance, which is set in a beautifully restored hundred-year-old Chinese courtyard building first built in the Qing Dynasty. Although Chinese Emperors have previously stayed at the Daci Temple, The Temple House evokes the modest houses provided for scholars who came from different parts of the world to study at the Temple.

The hotel’s leisure facilities include Mi Xun, an urban day spa, and an indoor pool with natural light and a gym. For dining, Tivan restaurant features a wood-fired pizza oven in an open kitchen, which is still quite unusual in this part of China. The hotel’s bar is Jing, a stylish bar that will have DJs and offer local beers and handcrafted cocktails, plus an extensive list of wines and champagnes by the glass.

The new hotel’s opening offer is a € 24 trip to the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. The offer involves a six-mile cab ride from the centre of town to the research base, where 124 darling baby pandas have been born since 2008. You will go there in an Audi Q7 or Buick GL8 and the deal includes a pair of entry tickets and a cuddly panda toy.

Image by Temple House Hotel