Yangshuo Sugarhouse Hotel by Vector Architects converts a disused 1960s sugar mill in Guangxi into a hotel complex in which preserved industrial structures, new guest accommodation, water courts, and framed views of the karst landscape are organized into a continuous architectural composition.
Yangshuo Sugarhouse Hotel Technical Information
- Architects: Vector Architects
- Location: Yangshuo, Guilin, Guangxi, China
- Gross Area: 16,000 m2 | 172,222 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years: 2013 – 2017
- Photographs: © Trevor Patt, © Shengliang Su, © Hao Chen
In order to create a sense of consistency, instead of simply copying the old materiality and texture, we sought a nuance where we use more contemporary materials and construction methods while retaining the tinge and masonry structure of the old.
– Vector Architects
Industrial Memory in a Karst Landscape
Yangshuo Sugarhouse Hotel occupies a narrow site near the Li River, where the landscape is defined by steep limestone peaks, humid vegetation, and a long cultural history of landscape representation. Against this setting stands a different form of memory: a 1960s sugar mill with brick production halls, a chimney, and a sugar cane loading structure that once connected industrial work to river transport.
Vector Architects positions these remnants as the spatial and symbolic center of the complex. The old mill is not treated as scenery for a new resort program, but as the primary architectural fact around which the project is organized. Weathered brick walls, tiled roofs, steel stairs, original openings, and the surviving loading dock remain legible, allowing the building to retain the directness of its former industrial use.
The site plan negotiates a clear environmental tension. To the north, a road brings access and noise; to the south, the river and mountains offer depth, distance, and orientation. The architecture responds by placing its most expansive spaces, including ponds, terraces, and the adapted pool, toward the landscape, while the more enclosed edges mediate between the hotel and the road.
Old and New as a Continuous Composition
The new guest room and villa volumes are arranged around the preserved mill rather than replacing it or reducing it to a decorative fragment. This disposition allows the original buildings to hold the center of the ensemble, while the additions operate as secondary structures that extend the site without competing for visual dominance. The mill remains the element through which the project is first understood.
Continuity is pursued through proportion and profile rather than literal reproduction. The new buildings are kept lower than the old mill, and their pitched roofs echo the existing roof forms without copying their construction or surface condition. From a distance, the ensemble reads as a related group of volumes, yet the distinctions between inherited fabric and contemporary intervention remain clear.
Reflecting ponds and sunken plazas sharpen this relationship. Water isolates the brick halls as readable figures and doubles their mass in reflection, while lowered ground planes establish moments of pause around the existing structures. These devices create a controlled distance between observer and ruin, turning the former factory into an object of architectural scrutiny rather than nostalgia.
Movement, Void, and Framed Landscape
The main guest wing contains two circulation systems with different architectural roles. One serves the rooms in a direct, functional manner. The other acts as a public promenade, rising from the ground and passing through the building as an extension of the landscape walk. This second route gives the accommodation block a civic dimension within the hotel complex, allowing movement to become a spatial experience rather than only a service requirement.
Along this promenade, full-height voids function as cave-like nodes. Their scale and darkness evoke the region’s geological formations without mimicking natural caves. Each void frames a specific view toward the karst peaks or nearby cliffs, producing alternating states of compression, shadow, openness, and light. The sequence is geometric and constructed, yet it draws from the experience of moving through the carved and eroded spaces of the surrounding terrain.
The most direct transformation of inherited infrastructure occurs at the former sugar cane loading dock. Its concrete posts and beams, once part of an industrial transfer mechanism, now support an outdoor pool projecting toward the river. The intervention changes the structure’s use while preserving its linear force, creating a threshold where body, water, river, and mountain are aligned through a found architectural frame.
Material Strategy and Tectonic Interpretation
The material palette enhances the mill’s character without falsifying its age. Board-formed concrete, hollow concrete block, local masonry, bamboo, terrazzo, stucco, and pebbledash establish a muted and tactile language that sits close to the weathered brick of the existing buildings. The new construction is materially related to the old, but its methods and finishes remain recognizably contemporary.
A custom perforated brick screen wraps portions of the guest wing, producing a facade that filters light, air, and views. The lattice softens the boundary between interior rooms, gardens, and mountains, while also protecting the rooms from the road-facing side of the site. Its porosity gives the new volume a lighter tectonic expression than the solid mill walls, allowing a difference to emerge through construction rather than through contrast alone.
Interior interventions follow a similar logic of restraint. Concrete platforms, steel stairs, brick walls, timber-framed openings, and industrial traces are retained where they can support new occupation. In the former pressing spaces, new floors, lighting, seating, and partitions are layered over the existing fabric without erasing it. The result is not a reconstruction of industrial life, but a careful recalibration of its spatial evidence for contemporary use.
About Vector Architects
Vector Architects is a Beijing-based studio founded by Dong Gong in 2008, after he worked at Richard Meier and Partners and Steven Holl Architects in New York. The practice is known for a site-driven, light-conscious, and tectonically restrained approach, with work that includes the Seashore Library and Seashore Chapel in Beidaihe and the Captain’s House in Fujian.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: Wenfu Zheng, Bo Li, Xianzhong Zhou
- MEP consultants: Shenzhen JS M&E Engineering Design Co., Ltd. (Sen Lin, Haijia Li, Fuliang Wei, Jiaorong He, Yu Gao)
- Landscape designers: Qianbai Yu, Yingying Xiao
- Client: Landmark Tourism Investment Company
- Principal Architect: Dong Gong; Architecture
- Design Team: Bin He, Nan Wang, Chen Liu, Fangzhou Zhu, Xiangdong Kong, Peng Zhang, Liangliang Zhao, Jian Wang, Mengyao Xu, Yue Han, Zhiyong Liu, Bai Li, Xiaokai Ma;
- Interior Architect: Bin Ju, Horizontal Space Design;
- Interior Design Team: Jinjing Wei, Yaocheng Wei, Hongming Nie, Luokai Zhang, Fanyu Luo, Wenjun Zhou;
- Site Architects: Liangliang Zhao, Peng Zhang, Yingfa Li, Xipu Li;
- Lighting Consultant: Albert Martin Klaasen, Klaasen Lighting Design
- LDI: Guilin Institute of Architectural Design Co., Ltd.
- Hotel Management: Alila Hotels and Resorts
- Photography: Trevor Patt, Shengliang Su, Hao Chen
