The Grand Hyatt Kunming is the latest addition to Hyatt’s growing collection of luxury hotels in China, designed to go beyond the expected by strongly connecting to their surroundings. The natural and colourful beauty of the Yunnan Province is renowned worldwide, yet in Kunming, most buildings display an overt and often indiscriminate use of colour. The concept developed between long time collaborators The Flaming Beacon and MQ studio was to take a very different approach by drawing on the province’s lesser explored beauty and to give these features a contemporary twist, free of cliche.
Warm to very warm white light is carefully integrated into architectural features to create the backdrop to a sequence of dramatic interior spaces for the guests to explore. These spaces are then paired with custom light objects that vary from architectural in scale and materiality to human scale, with softer materials appropriate for guest comfort.
The arrival volume is both dramatic and surprising to guests. The design team played on the famous reflective quality of the sky seen in the local rice fields and then inverted this vision to instead reflect the ground plane as seen in the hundreds of clear ribbed glass cylindrical tubes arranged as an extruded parabolic form. In the evening, led strips hidden behind regularly spaced chromed metal cylinders illuminate the rear parabolic surface, which is then seen distorted through the refractive glass cylinders.
Passing through a dark lowered corridor, the guests enter the main reception, a double height space playing homage to local mining in the form of a continuous uplit sinuous copper ceiling culminating in 5 giant custom-made copper wall lights that form the backdrop to the reception.
Originally conceived as a homage to the sesame plants that would protect the local rice fields from insects, these lights were later enthusiastically described by the client as not being out of place in downtown Gotham City! The copper ceiling swoops down to become a more intimate reception lounge space, with copper floor lights growing out of the middle of back-to-back banquette seating, each shade with a delicate hanging arrangement as observed in early Yunnan lantern designs.
The Ballroom concept pays homage to the dangerous profession of cliff honey collecting, famous in Yunnan. A projected shadow of the handmade rope ladders used in the collection of the honey, appears in the full height wall niches, culminating in an abstracted textured lattice ceiling light that appears to grow out of the ceiling in the shape of the alluring honeycomb.
The use of coloured light is extremely restrained, only appearing once in the hotel as the backdrop to the signage at the entrance of each guestroom. This backdrop, a reflector, is woven from individually dyed bamboo strands to create concentric patterns in four distinct colours representing the four blooming seasons of Yunnan. Throughout the day four pre-programmed light colours render the dyed woven reflector differently to subtly shift the mood of the space from a cool blue to a sunset red.
