Designed by One Take Architects, Silver Lining Boutique Country Hotel is a renovation project in Bamboo Sea Village in Hufu Township, Yixing County, which is home to a well-known scenic spot in Jiangnan (South Yangtze River Area).

Different from the romantic perception most people have about country life on a hillside, the village seems out of place in such picturesque surroundings. The owners? building is no exception.
Photography: Wei Kang
The massive volume brought by successive expansions came into sharp contrast with the texture of countryside. Renovation should not be a procrustean alteration against a pre-determined, idealistic image of spaces. Rather, renovation requires one to explore and feature fine properties of the original construction, while addressing the inconvenient ones.
The design began with a study of the area?s layout. The load-bearing brickwork in the construction offered little room for renovation, so any attempt to reshape atmosphere and experience in the stairwell must be done without structural change to the walls. Architects installed several bookshelves there and cladded the roof and bottom of the wall with mirrors, creating an illusion of infinity where the bookshelves and stairs seem to continue forever, which has an effect of elongating the well.
Before & Atfer
Great emphasis was given to the individual identities of windows and hence the identities of different rooms. The original cookie-cutter windows and ill-conceived balconies were ...