Rock-Solid Luxury: InterContinental Shanghai Wonderland

From an abandoned quarry to a high-polish hotel experience, the InterContinental Shanghai Wonderland Hotel by Chinese design studio, Cheng Chung Design (CCD), is a medley of mining cues mixed with 21st century luxury hotel culture.

The hotel has been constructed inside an abandoned quarry, and ambitiously built beneath ground-level with part of it submerged beneath water, too. With an interior design experience that references everything from wild rocks to vertical cliffs, visitors might mistake themselves for being on a luxurious cave adventure.

Dedicated to “reshaping the relationship between architecture and the natural environment through hospitality design”, CCD has used this project to comment on the changing relationship between humans and nature – and where better than in the remnants of a quarry?

The experience starts in the lobby where a series of towering cliff faces emulate the natural appearance of bed-rocks at different heights. “The design inspiration is from the horizontal and vertical textures formed by the flooding of magma due to crustal movement,” notes CCD. The raw and the precious come into play with a bronze wall referencing the colour of miners’ tools – an evocative melding of humanity with nature.

Other zones in the hotel include the cave-like ballroom where shadow and LED light interplay to create a dreamy starlight effect. At the base of the site is an indoor pool area, where stalactitelike feature ceilings and pillars give the effect of a Biquan cave. Submerging visitors into a watery wonderland is the undersea restaurant as well as select guest rooms. Immersed in crystalline, watery hues and surrounded by flickering fish, CCD intended the effect to be otherworldly.

By virtue of its ambitious subterranean design, the project was “confronted with numerous challenges and difficulties in landscape planning, material usage, and mechanical engineering”, notes CCD. The outcome, nevertheless, evokes a memorable combination of the raw and rocky, with an elaborate douse of high glam.