Bvlgari Hotel Shanghai

The oldest part of Bvlgari Hotel Shanghai stands on North Suzhou Road, at the north end of the Henan Road Bridge. It was built for the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce, founded in February 1912, which drafted China's first business law and opened the country's first commercial arbitration office. The site had been the residence of Qing imperial envoys, and the merchants entered their three-storey Western-style building, completed in 1916, through a gate modelled on a Roman triumphal arch. A small garden inside held a monument to four Boy Scouts killed by Japanese troops in January 1932 while helping wounded soldiers.

Photo: Fayhoo / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

After 1949 the building passed to the Shanghai Federation of Industry and Commerce, which moved out in 1979, and it was then leased to an electronic-components research institute and other work units. Its restoration took seven years, by the account of the Shanghai government's information office, and it reopened in June 2018, the month the hotel opened beside it. It now holds the hotel's ballroom and its Cantonese restaurant, Bao Li Xuan.

The Hong Kong-listed OCT (Asia) signed with the jeweller Bulgari in 2012 to build a hotel and residences at Suhe Creek, its riverside regeneration scheme, and the tower was finished in 2016. The hotel opened on 20 June 2018 as the sixth Bvlgari hotel, with 82 rooms and suites on the top eight floors of a 48-storey tower, above the Bvlgari Residences. Patricia Viel of Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel, the firm behind every Bvlgari hotel, said it expresses "the quintessentially Roman spirit of the brand", and the marble vitrines of its lift hall are modelled on the Via dei Condotti boutique in Rome.

The hotel is on the north bank of Suzhou Creek, where the Jing'an and Huangpu districts meet, not on the Bund itself, which it looks towards: its opening release promised views of the Bund, Pudong, the Huangpu and the creek. OKYTO's Shanghai guide compares the city's districts.

According to the sale filing reported by Mingtiandi, the hotel lost money in every year from its opening to 2023, with occupancy between 54 and 57 per cent from 2019 to the first half of 2023. On 25 December 2023 OCT's Shanghai subsidiary agreed to sell it to Jiangsu Jinfeng Cement Group for RMB 2.43 billion, 43 per cent above its appraisal; completion was expected in the first half of 2024; no closing has been reported. Whether the Bvlgari name would stay was left to negotiation; the official site still presents the hotel as Bvlgari. Jiemian reported it as the first Bvlgari hotel ever sold.

Sources: The Paper; Shanghai Information Office; Bvlgari; Hospitality Net; Design and Architecture; Mingtiandi; Jiemian; Bvlgari Hotel Shanghai