March 11, 2007
Journeys | Shanghai
By ANDREW YANG
IN recent years, Shanghai has witnessed the appearance of all the accoutrements that befit a quickly growing, cosmopolitan city, with high-end restaurants like Jean Georges and flagship fashion boutiques such as Armani and Dolce & Gabbana popping up in the city's more affluent sections.
Until now, one kind of establishment has eluded the city: the boutique hotel. But a new wave of these hotels are opening this year, providing yet another lure to entice the young international travelers who are already flocking to this city, whose transformation is occurring at breathtaking speed.
While the label “boutique” has evolved in recent years to describe hotels of almost any size that feature a modern design concept, three new establishments — Jia Shanghai, the Mansion Boutique Hotel and M Suites — will epitomize the term.
Jia Shanghai, an outpost of the popular Philippe Starck-designed Hong Kong hotel, will have 55 rooms, while the Mansion Hotel, in a renovated French villa-style manor, will have just 30 rooms. M Suites, part of a new development on Suzhou Creek, with just 24 rooms, is the most boutique of them all.
With major brands racing to open locations in the city — among them the W, Park Hyatt, the Peninsula and the Mandarin Oriental — these new establishments represent just a small percentage of the available rooms in the city's vast hospitality landscape. Yet the appeal, in terms of buzz and prestige, is tremendous.
In April, Jia Shanghai is to open at 931 West Nanjing Road, (86-21) 6217-9000. Its arrival in Shanghai has been noted in the local press and in international travel publications like Travel & Leisure, and in guidebooks such as the Luxe city-guide series. With just about no hotel experience, Yenn Wong, the 28-year-old Singaporean entrepreneur behind the Jia concept, opened Jia Hong Kong in 2003 with the boutique-hotel originator himself, Mr. Starck, and created a runaway success that was also Hong Kong's first designer boutique property. (Ms. Wong has opted to go with the Australian firm Hecker Phelan & Guthrie to design the Shanghai hotel.)
“There are a lot of frequent travelers now, and there are more choices,” she said. “Even with Philippe Starck, we downplayed the design of the rooms, and made it more comfortable. And that worked very well.”
Jia, which means “home” in Chinese, is based on a hotel-as-domestic space concept, where rooms feel like apartments. “This concept is something we are going to translate to all our other properties,” she said. Another branch of Jia is to open in Krabi, Thailand, next year.
Located within a former apartment building, Jia Shanghai will feature an Italian restaurant on the second floor to be managed by the celebrity chef Salvatore Cuomo, the entrepreneur who has a chain of high-end and mid-priced Italian restaurants throughout Japan. Eventually, a bar and lounge will open on the roof. The interiors will be a series of modern but warm spaces, with touches like timber-paneled walls, a minimal style with hints of chinoiserie, and funky accents like Gio Ponti chairs and sofas by Antonio Citterio.
The hotel is entered with a private key card, a move the hotel says is intended to give guests a sense of privacy as well as exclusivity. “We think there's a niche for this kind of product,” said Daniel Ong, the hotel's general manager, noting that the rates for the hotel are in the mid-range, with rack rates around $275 a night — and sometimes lower — making it more affordable to a younger crowd who are not on corporate accounts.
That same fashionable crowd has also been flocking to the Pier One development, along the city's Suzhou Creek. Not too far away from the gallery district, the former Union Brewery has been renovated into a night-life playground, which includes a huge supper club on the ground floor, a rooftop bar and — sandwiched in between — M Suites, at 88 Yi Chang Road, (86-21) 5155-8399, or www.msuites.com.cn.
Set in a re-landscaped public park, the hotel, which opened in January, features a range of accommodations, from single rooms at 980 yuan (about $130 at 7.9 yuan to the U.S. dollar) to the Empress Suite at 2,888 yuan. While the design is meant to be modern and sleek — with large flat-screen TVs, and circular beds in some rooms — it's similiar to what's offered at W hotels.
Like the other entrepreneurs, Miao-Miao Jiang, M Suites' executive director, was also quick to emphasize the lack of designer hotels in Shanghai. “Not many others have done it here,” she said. “So I don't think we have too many competitors. Also, who else can be near the downtown business center, with a park, underground parking spaces and a boating dock?” Indeed, the hotel does feature these amenities, but its location, in a largely industrial area on the edge of the city center, puts it in an unconventional category.
If both Jia and M Suites were meant to reflect Shanghai's desire for modern amenities, the Mansion Hotel, at 82 Xinle Road, (86-21) 5403-9888, in the heart of the city's French Concession district, is a complete throwback to the swinging Shanghai of the 1920s.
Situated in a French manor-style house that was once the home of a notorious Chinese mob boss, the Mansion Hotel has been rehabilitated from a largely abandoned shell that as recently as last spring had badly sagging wood floors. With its gut renovation completed last month, this charming five-story limestone structure has been painstakingly restored into a 30-room property that feels more like a member's club for the Fortune 500 set.
Right before the hotel's partial opening last month, its developer, Lu-Jun Yin, cranked an old Columbia gramophone from 1910, and instantly the cavernous lobby, with its 15-foot ceilings, filled with a 1920s recording of the Beijing opera singer Mei Lanfang.
“We wanted to make this hotel part of the story we want to tell about old Shanghai,” he said, noting the other classic vintage antiques housed in the new glass cases all throughout the hotel's lobby. Every detail of the hotel reflects the building's former grandeur, said Mr. Yin, now the chief executive officer of Boutique Hotels International, which is behind the development of the Mansion Hotel. In the French Concession on Xinle Road, a trendy corridor that includes coffee shops, wine bars and independent fashion boutiques, the Mansion Hotel is discreetly tucked behind a gated courtyard that has a manicured garden with a small pond.
Trying to create a hospitality experience steeped in history was an idea Mr. Yin first explored when he was general manager of Xintiandi several years ago, and opened 88 Xintiandi, the complex's signature hotel. While that project was in a new building surrounded by old shikumen, or traditional Shanghai courtyard houses, the idea had stayed with him ever since. “I really think it's a new way to retain the city's character,” Mr. Yin said.
Because of the crowd that the hotel hopes to attract — corporate executives and other elite travelers — the hotel is commanding possibly the highest rates anywhere in Shanghai, with $550 for a basic room to $880 for suites. Each room has 15-foot ceilings and a large Jacuzzi.
The Mansion's rooftop has been renovated into a bar, which looks out over the low rooftops of the French Concession. Since the hotel is small, Mr. Yin said, the public facilities, such as the first-floor lounge, the private dining rooms and the rooftop, are available primarily to guests staying at the hotel. Special key cards for entry will be issued to select friends and associates of the hotel, giving the Mansion a clubhouse-like feel.
While all of these new boutique hotels seem to signal the city's rising glamour among international travelers, these properties have all arrived, seemingly simultaneously, because of a shared belief that the market is finally ready.
“Until now, the need has not been fulfilled,” said Ms. Wong, of Jia Shanghai. “The people who will stay with us are not people who will normally stay in megahotels. They are a discerning lot.”
The success of these establishments will depend on their personalities, she noted, and to a degree the personalities of their developers.
Ms. Wong said the recent wave of boutique hotels may be just the beginning. Already, there is talk about other properties around the city, including another location in the French Concession and another vacant site on the riverfront Bund district that is under development.
“In the next few years,” she predicted, “there will be a boom in boutique hotels.”
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