Banyan Tree Mount Emei is a 34,070-square-meter hospitality complex at the foot of Mount Emei in Sichuan, organized as a low-density network of courtyards, pavilions, terraces, and guest villas embedded within existing woodland and beside a lake. Architecture by BUZZ and interiors by CCD draw on Western Sichuan construction traditions, using water, retained trees, deep eaves, and framed views to structure the site experience.
Banyan Tree Mount Emei Technical Information
- ArchitectsBUZZ
- Interior DesignCCD / Cheng Chung Design (HK)
- LocationNo. 55, Section 1, Jingqu Road, Huangwan Town, Emeishan City, Sichuan, China
- Gross Area34,070 m2 | 366,729 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2012 – 2026
- Photographs© Wang Ting
Eastern artistic conception in Western form.
– Joe Cheng
Building with the Existing Landscape
Set at the base of Mount Emei near Baoguo Temple, the project avoids a singular building mass in favor of dispersed courtyard blocks and villas. Its footprint follows the lake edge, wooded slopes, and relatively level clearings, producing an uneven but deliberate settlement pattern. From aerial views, the development reads primarily through dark roof ridges and illuminated courts, while its grey tiled planes recede into bamboo and broadleaf canopy. This low profile is less an image-making gesture than a practical response to a visually sensitive foothill site.
Seven mature camphor trees determine key boundaries in the plan. Rather than treating the trees as ornamental remnants, brick retaining walls bend around their trunks, circulation paths adjust their trajectory, and private outdoor spaces take their dimensions from the available root zones. The result is an architecture in which irregularity is not concealed. Terraces, courtyards, and planted enclosures register the forest’s physical persistence, making landscape retention legible in the complex’s organization.
Grey brick walls, clay roof tiles, timber elements, and deep eaves establish a materially restrained exterior language. These components share tonal affinities with wet stone, tree bark, and the subdued atmosphere of the mountain foothills. The pitched roofs also manage heavy regional rainfall, directing water away from enclosed rooms while extending sheltered zones along paths and verandas. Their repeated silhouette gives the dispersed program a common tectonic order without requiring uniform building forms.
Courtyard, Water, and the Arrival Sequence
The arrival sequence is organized through delay and partial disclosure. A winding drive moves through woodland before passing grey brick walls, shallow water basins, stone objects, and timber canopies. Openings in the masonry operate as calibrated viewfinders, revealing a pavilion, courtyard, or planted threshold in fragments rather than presenting the complex all at once. This approach recalls the spatial sequencing of temple compounds and mountain paths, where movement is structured by compression, turn, pause, and release.
At the center of the public interior, a water courtyard establishes a climatic and visual threshold between exterior landscape and lobby. A dark reflecting pool contains stone, moss, and a sculpted pine, while timber lattice panels rise directly from the water’s edge. The pool doubles the screens and roofline through reflection, increasing the apparent depth of a compact court. Mist across the surface introduces a controlled atmospheric layer, though the stronger architectural effect comes from the contrast between the pool’s horizontal stillness and the vertical grain of the surrounding timber.
Four roof planes converge around this court in an interpretation of the traditional principle of four waters returning to the hall. Here, drainage is not hidden within a technical system but is given a central spatial role. Water becomes an ordering device for enclosure, roof geometry, reflection, and orientation. The inward-folding eaves also make the lobby court a protected void, allowing the building to maintain an environmental connection to rain, humidity, and planting without exposing the interior to the full force of the mountain climate.
Translating Western Sichuan Construction Traditions
The interior language takes Western Sichuan vernacular construction as a source of spatial and structural logic rather than as a catalog of decorative motifs. Chuan-dou timber framing, pitched roof profiles, covered verandas, lattice windows, and layered eaves are abstracted across the lobby, restaurants, and gathering spaces. The lobby’s timber grid ceiling rises toward a shallow ridge and falls at its edges, making the ceiling a large-scale reconstruction of a roof’s internal rhythm. In adjacent lounge areas, curved timber ribs and deep coffers offer different readings of the same structural vocabulary.
This method is most effective when the references remain tectonic. Grilles divide rooms into permeable zones, bracket-like joints give localized emphasis to columns and doors, and perforated brickwork provides both visual porosity and depth. In the dining areas, ceiling forms evoke the volume beneath a pitched roof, while curved banquettes introduce a softer, more contemporary counterpoint to the rectilinear framework. The project does not reproduce historic interiors; instead, it uses familiar construction principles to establish proportion, texture, and degrees of enclosure.
Material contrasts prevent the timber language from becoming overly uniform. Rough stone walls and piers introduce a geological register related to the basalt formations and ravines of Mount Emei. Grey brick supplies mass and shadow, while woven rattan and bamboo surfaces bring a lighter, fibrous scale to rooms intended for extended occupation. Red glass blocks punctuate otherwise subdued corridors with filtered color, and bronze pulls or fittings provide small points of weight and tactility. These materials are most persuasive where their physical properties remain apparent: the grain of wood, the unevenness of stone, the voids in brick, and the hand-worked texture of woven elements.
Hospitality Spaces as Framed Landscape Rooms
The public program repeatedly positions occupation against the site’s water, bamboo, and mountain horizon. Full-height glazing in the lobby lounge turns the lake into a distant visual field beyond the water courtyard, while terraces extend dining rooms toward reflecting pools and planted edges. These openings do not erase the boundary between building and site. Deep eaves, timber screens, veranda zones, and masonry reveals thicken that boundary, giving occupants shaded positions from which to observe changing weather and vegetation.
The Huizong Academy, lake pavilion, pool, and spa distribute quieter activities across the landscape rather than concentrating them within the main building. The academy uses a timber truss volume and long tea table to frame a slower mode of gathering, with bamboo visible through glazed walls and perforated brick parapets. At the lake, a boardwalk extends toward a pavilion whose broad soffit is reflected in the water. The indoor pool adopts a more enclosed atmosphere: dark mosaic water, rough stone piers, horizontal timber slats, and a glazed wall facing bamboo establish a controlled relationship between bodily immersion and the forest outside.
Guestrooms continue this sectional and perceptual layering at a domestic scale. Entry, wardrobe, living area, bed, bath, and courtyard are arranged as a sequence rather than as isolated compartments. Framed openings and elongated windows direct attention toward ferns, old trees, brick courts, or more distant slopes, while sloped ceilings and recessed lighting retain the roof’s presence overhead. Outdoor soaking pools and daybeds sit within planted enclosures screened by stone walls, timber battens, and drapery. Privacy is therefore achieved through depth, vegetation, and oblique views rather than through complete separation from the surrounding woodland.
About CCD / Cheng Chung Design (HK)
CCD / Cheng Chung Design (HK) was founded by Joe Cheng and has design teams based in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Los Angeles, Beijing, Shanghai, and Bangkok. The studio specializes in interior design and consulting for international brand hotels, approaching hospitality spaces through the concept of Eastern artistic conception in Western form.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Landscape Designers: GVL
- Client: Emeishan Yinyi Cultural Tourism Investment & Construction Co., Ltd.
- Other Contributors: Photography by Wang Ting
