The PuXuan Opens in Ole Scheeren’s Guardian Art Center in Beijing

The PuXuan Hotel and Spa opened in February 2019 in Beijing. It has 116 rooms, 24 of them suites, in the upper part of the Guardian Art Center, at the corner of Wangfujing Street and Wusi Street. The Forbidden City’s north-east corner is a few minutes away on foot, and the National Art Museum of China stands across the road.

The building

The Guardian Art Center is the headquarters of China Guardian, the country’s oldest auction house for art. It was designed by the German architect Ole Scheeren and completed in 2018, and it combines auction rooms, exhibition galleries, conservation studios, a bookshop and the hotel in a single structure.

Scheeren divided the building in two. The lower part is a cluster of grey stone blocks, sized to the courtyard houses of the hutongs around it and pierced with thousands of small round windows whose pattern reproduces a famous Yuan dynasty landscape painting, Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains. Above them floats a ring of glass bricks around a central courtyard, which recalls the scale of the modern city. The hotel occupies this ring. It was among the first major new buildings permitted so close to the palace, and it was widely praised for the way it handled the setting.

The hotel

The PuXuan is operated by Urban Resort Concepts, the company behind The PuLi in Shanghai. The interiors, by the Shanghai practice MQ Studio, are calm and dark-toned, with bronze, grey stone and timber, and furniture made for the hotel by Shang Xia, the Chinese craft brand founded with Hermès. Rooms face either the roofs of the Forbidden City and Jingshan Hill or the hutongs of Dongcheng to the east. The better rooms have terraces.

There are two restaurants. Fu Chun Ju serves Cantonese food in a room modelled on a courtyard house. Rive Gauche is a French restaurant in the style of a Parisian counter. A club lounge, a tea room and a library complete the public rooms. The UR Spa combines French products with treatments drawn from Chinese medicine.

Location

The address is the hotel’s main argument. Guests can walk to the Forbidden City, Jingshan Park, Beihai and the hutongs around the Drum Tower, which few hotels of this standard in Beijing allow. Auction previews and exhibitions take place downstairs throughout the year.

The Mandarin Oriental Wangfujing opened a few hundred metres to the south within weeks of The PuXuan. More recently, the Mandarin Oriental Qianmen offered another way of staying in the old city, in restored courtyard houses.