The Temple House Opens Beside Chengdu’s Daci Temple

The Temple House opened officially in Chengdu on 30 July 2015, the third hotel in Swire Hotels’ House Collective after The Opposite House in Beijing and The Upper House in Hong Kong. It has 100 rooms and 42 serviced apartments, and it stands beside Daci Temple, a Buddhist monastery with a history of more than a thousand years, in the centre of the Sichuan capital.

The hotel is entered through a restored courtyard building from the Qing dynasty, which serves as its reception and is one of several heritage structures kept on the site. Behind it, London practice Make Architects designed two L-shaped blocks around a sunken garden. Their facades are a woven pattern of brick, a reference to Sichuan textiles, and the stepped landscaping recalls the terraced fields of the province.

The Temple House opened with The Temple Café for all-day dining, the Italian restaurant Tivano and Jing Bar. Its most distinctive space is Mi Xun, a teahouse and spa set in a separate group of restored courtyard buildings, where vegetarian cooking and tea are served alongside treatments.

The hotel is part of a larger project. It adjoins Sino-Ocean Taikoo Li Chengdu, the low-rise, open-air shopping district developed by Swire Properties and Sino-Ocean around the temple, which keeps the scale of lanes and courtyards rather than replacing them with a mall. Brian Williams, then managing director of Swire Hotels, described the opening as a chance to take the brand into one of China’s wealthiest and fastest-growing regions, and general manager Mark Passmore spoke of residential-style accommodation rooted in the place.

Ten years on, the formula has held up. The Temple House remains the reference for design-led hotels in Chengdu, a city whose appeal to travellers rests on teahouses, Sichuan cooking and proximity to the mountains. OKYTO’s page on The Temple House has the details of the stay.