MeeHotel by Panorama Design Group: 2020 Best of Year Winner for Boutique Hotel

Widely used as a building material in China for centuries, bamboo grows in massive forests in the southeastern part of the country, where the city of Shenzhen is also found. Hong Kong studio Panorama Design Group took inspiration from the material in its creation of the 62,000-square-foot MeeHotel there, and, despite hiring a master weaver to help with the project, the design team steered the traditional handicraft in wholly new ways. In the reception and lobby lounge, full-height screens comprised of a dense crisscrossing of bamboo rods are overlaid on mud-finished walls. In a top-floor café, lengths of spaced bamboo form a churchlike structure with a gently curving cathedral ceiling. On guest-room floors, curves give way to giant swoops of bamboo draped from the ceiling in double-height central courtyards—installations are intended to make guests to feel like they are passing through an abstract forest before arriving at their rooms. There, headboards are crafted from bamboo strips tidily woven in a way that recalls the caning on seats.




Project Team: Horace Pan; Wendy Lam; Szeka Yung; Candace Pun; Ming Cai.
> See the full list of winners and honorees from Best of Year 2020