Within Jingdezhen, a city in China reputed for its historic porcelain production, a disused industrial warehouse, situated on a 6130 sqm site replete with age-old camphor trees, is now home to a contemporary hotel. Jingyang Camphor Court is the work of Beijing-based Vector Architects, “an urban public living room accompanied by a hospitality experience that is culture and human-oriented,” as per the design team. The architectural scheme includes a preexisting long and narrow industrial building, a few mechanical rooms, a dormitory and a dilapidated pavilion, alongside newly designed volumes.

The studio's founding partner, architect Dong Gong, who in a previous interview with STIR said that "the only way to achieve high-level architecture is by taking it very personally and emotionally”, unites the old and the new in this two-storey courtyard complex with remarkable sensitivity and precision.

With the limited site dimensions and the need to balance public and private realms, the Chinese architect crafted an exploratory, maze-like ensemble taking cues from local vernacular homes. A network of interstitial passages and intimate courtyards, flowing around towering camphor trees, encourages exploration while retaining a bold sense of place. “In and around the [existing] structures, camphor trees had grown to maturity. The retention of these trees became the basic premise of the project,” the design team shares.

The adaptive reuse of the hotel embraces transparency, accessibility and cultural engagement with a meticulous inward-planning surrounding the medial courtyard design. A two-storey timber cloister forms a continuous corridor around the preserved camphor grove. The entrance towards the east of the site sports a low, monolithic profile and folded canopies that create an immediate, amiable ingress.

The repurposed factory on the south of the complex houses a restaurant that honours its industrial legacy with enhanced thermal and acoustic features and a newly fabricated metal roof structure. For the restaurant, “the ceiling height was also increased and new skylights were introduced, creating a more pleasant and contemporary spatial atmosphere for guests while also paying homage to the site’s industrial past,” as mentioned in the press release.

In the west, a ‘courtyard-type building’ accommodates a multi-functional space and a meeting room on the lower floor and a banquet and activity room on the upper level, featuring gable walls that shape small public plazas and invite communal engagement. Meanwhile, to the north, guest rooms occupy the adapted dormitory space, where new structural interventions complement preserved walls. The rooms of the courtyard architecture benefit from a balcony overlooking the inner court and avenues between the buildings.

The façade design and materiality further tie the hospitality design to its heritage. "The bricks of the original structures had a red and orange hue. We wanted to honour this palette when opting for the tonality of the new buildings,” the Chinese designers share in the press statement. The distinctive volumes were clad in terracotta and old clay bricks, matching the size and character of local kiln bricks and complemented by warm-coloured concrete. This earthy palette establishes a harmonious transition between the old and the new, where subtle shifts in tone and texture reflect Jingdezhen’s legacy of porcelain production.

The arboreal expanse of the Jingyang Camphor Court has its every preserved relic and new inflection contribute to a collective story of cultural reverence and urban reinvention. Every detail of the hospitality architecture speaks of a design grounded in its context and forward-looking in its approach.

Project Details

Name: Jingyang Camphor Court
Location: No.150, Xinchang West Road, Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, China
Architect: Vector Architects
Principal Architect: Dong Gong
Construction Management: Zhao Liangliang, Li Jinteng
Facade Consultant: An-design Architects, LongBang Construction Co., Ltd.
Lighting Consultant: X Studio, School of Architecture, Tsinghua University
Timber Structural Consultant: IStructure & CROWNHOMES
Client: Jingdezhen Towyi Cultural Development Co., Ltd.
Floor Area: 8290 sqm
Footprint Area: 2400 sqm
Site Area: 6130 sqm
Year of Completion: 2023