West Lake Four Seasons Hotel was design in 2004. The site is located at the cultural village of Jinsha Harbour on Lingyin Road. There is rich greenary and water system resource on the site which surrounds the west side of the West Lake. On the near side is one of the top ten scenery of the West Lake “the Breeze at Crooked Courtyard” with beautiful water feature. On the far side are the south mountains across the lake facing to the site.
By strengthening the West Lake’s "picturesque" conception, building the West Lake’s new landscape as a concept direction, we tried to explore the landscape elements, to extend the natural conception as hotel’s major landscape elements, and to carefully design the relationships between the building complex and the courtyard spaces.
The traditional south Yangtze River garden style was applied to the design. The main view axis of the hotel is from entry courtyard, lobby, swimming pool, waterfall, the lake, hotel villas to mountains. There are two wings of hotel rooms with courtyards integrated in between to create different space rhythm. Restaurants and banquet hall are spread out along inner side of the lake on the east side. The Chinese restaurant and private rooms are integrated with verandas, providing different view experience while walking along them. The hills and ponds in the park were reshaped a bit without changing too much of their original structure. New plants were planted in the entire site. The villas were applied with courtyard layout with solemn front yards and relax backyards. Wood, roof tiles and stone construction were based on traditional “Su” style, but other details was re-designed by using simplified techniques and details.
Longer design and construction period for the project gave the design team more time to think and solve problems. The collaboration with the international well-known interior and landscape design firms brought a lot of excitement to the project. Supervisions on site throughout the whole construction period by the Four Season’s Group, Greentown Design Group and the management team brought a real life to the hotel.
