DATA SHEET
Owner: Sumei Skyline Coast Boutique Hotel, Sanya
Architecture & Interior design: GS Design
Furnishings: on design
Photo credits: Ao Xiang
Enjoying the seascape with a clear mind: This seems to have have been the driving thought of GS Design – a group of young designers from Shenzhen – at every stage of their project for the Sumei Skyline Coast Boutique Hotel in Sanya, a well-known tourist destination in China. The all-encompassing use of pure, powerful white inside and outside the building allows you to slow your breathing, clear your thoughts and calm your spirit. With nothing to disturb your contemplation of the sky and the ocean, the colors and tones that emerge at different times of day and night promote wellbeing. The movement of light and shadow on every surface marks time, poetically painting an ever-changing spatial structure.
Having long explored how architectural style interacts with human beings and nature, here the studio was also concerned with geometric shapes like circles, semicircles and squares within a three-dimensional aesthetic sequence, as well as repeated arches around the windows, which evoke peaking waves.
The lobby is anything but traditional, a welcoming area without edges dominated by flowing, curving lines that shape the reception desk, the seats, the tables, and even the small pool that, filled to the brim, visually connects the interior with the expanse of sea beyond the window.
The same full, enveloping effect of integration with the boundless ocean, which itself mirrors the sky, is repeated in the ground-floor beach-side infinity pool, the one on the terrace, and the various bathtubs in several rooms right next to the large windows.
GS Design conceived all areas of the hotel to be open-concept, starting with the elimination of doors in the hallways and common rooms, not only to let light flow freely – skylights are also set above the beds – but to give guests ever varied views of the landscape.
