Atelier Guo Threads Concrete Pavilions and a Sunken DJ Booth Through a Former Sugar Refinery Hotel in Yangshuo

Most hotel expansions add rooms. Atelier Guo added almost nothing. Sugar House + is a scatter of small concrete structures, 100 m² in total, set across the grounds of a Yangshuo hotel that occupies a former state-owned sugar refinery on the Li River. The site already carries two layers of authorship: Zhao Chongxin restored the refinery between 2013 and 2017, and Dong Gong completed the guestrooms and overall layout that fixed the hotel's spatial framework. Led by Liaohui Guo, the studio's task was to work in the gaps those earlier moves left behind.

What interests us is the scale of the intervention relative to its ambition. Begun in 2022, the initiative treats the hotel's underused and disconnected corners as latent territory, then activates them with a Waterside Pavilion, a Hillside Pavilion and a DJ booth. None of these is a building in the conventional sense. They are roofs, benches and plinths, each one a node that gives you a reason to walk somewhere you would otherwise skip. It is a landscape strategy executed in concrete, and it asks how little architecture you need to change the way a place is used.

A Canopy on One Leg by the Pond

The Waterside Pavilion is reduced to a single gesture: a flat concrete canopy balanced on one central pier at the edge of a still pond. With no perimeter columns, the roof reads as a held breath above the ground, and the view out is unobstructed in every direction. Sit beneath it and the frame does the work, pulling the perforated brick building across the water and the jagged karst peak behind it into one composed picture.

The tilt of the roof matters more than it first appears. It lowers the eave toward the water and lifts it toward the path, so the shelter feels open to arrival and enclosed toward the view. That is a lot of spatial nuance to extract from one slab and one support.

Measuring Against the Karst

Yangshuo's limestone peaks are among the most photographed landscapes in China, and any structure placed here competes with them. Atelier Guo declines the contest. The pavilions stay low and horizontal, their flat roofs echoing the pond surface rather than reaching toward the hills. From a distance they register as datum lines, giving the eye a level edge against which the irregular karst profile becomes more legible.

The concrete also speaks quietly to the refinery buildings around it. Next to the vine-streaked gabled block and the stone-clad structures by the water, the new work looks like it belongs to the same industrial family, only stripped to its most elementary parts.

Into the Bamboo Grove

The Hillside Pavilion sits inside dense bamboo, and here the logic flips. Where the waterside canopy opens outward, this one hunkers down. A low bench, a short wall and a floating slab carve a pocket of shade from the grove, with ferns and leaf litter running right up to the concrete. The structure does not clear the vegetation so much as negotiate a space within it.

On the brick-paved terrace, a bench and cantilevered slab hide under overhanging branches until you are almost upon them. This is the most persuasive argument for the project's scattered approach: the pavilions are discovered, not announced, and that discovery is what draws guests deeper into the grounds.

Edges, Notches and Undersides

With so little mass to work with, the detailing carries the design. Roof corners are notched and stepped, so the slab edge breaks down into smaller increments as it meets the bamboo. The result is a profile that softens where hard concrete touches moving leaves, a sensible response to a material that would otherwise look blunt against foliage.

Look up and the angled soffit becomes the main surface you experience. In soft overcast light it reflects the green of the grass and bamboo back down onto the bench and paver path, so the shelter takes on the colour of its surroundings.

Digging Down for the DJ Booth

The DJ booth is the project's most surprising move. Instead of placing an object on a floor, the team appears to have broken into the ground, exposing a rough-cut stone bed and setting stepped concrete boxes and a steel pole into it. A bar counter rests on the same excavated rock, framed by glass balustrades and lounge seating in warm low light.

Revealing raw ground inside a hospitality interior reads as a deliberate act of excavation, peeling back the polished surface of the hotel to show the site's geological substrate. It ties the nightlife program to the same terrain that produces the karst outside.

Small Moves Across a Big Site

The aerial view shows what the pavilions are up against: lawns, hillside slopes and existing follies like a round thatched hut, all spread across grounds large enough to feel diffuse. The new structures act like punctuation in a long sentence, setting pauses and rhythm for a walk that previously had none.

The image of a single figure seated beneath the waterside roof, mirrored in the pond, captures the intent. These are places for one or two people to stop, sized to the body rather than to the event.

Plans and Drawings

The site plans make the strategy explicit: three small volumes marked in red, dispersed along the road and the hill contours, each attached to a different edge of the hotel. The pavilion plan shows how the diagonally folded roof, bench and stepped path are worked out on a tight grid.

The elevations and sections are drawn with figures, sketched trees and bamboo in every frame, which tells you how the studio thinks: the structure is never shown alone. The hillside sections show the shelters stepping into the slope, with the roof edge folding or tilting to meet the terrain.

The café plan and booth sections clarify the sunken stepped block at the heart of the interior. Graduated grey tones in the nested volumes describe a terraced landscape in miniature, topped by a thin roof plate on slender columns, the same vocabulary of slab and support used outdoors.

Why This Project Matters

Adaptive reuse projects in China often end once the main building is restored. Sugar House + suggests the work continues long after, through a patient series of small insertions that respond to how a place is actually used. A decade after Zhao Chongxin and Dong Gong set the hotel's framework, Atelier Guo is editing it in increments of a few square meters, and the site is better for that restraint.

For designers, the lesson is about leverage. One hundred square meters of concrete, deployed as connectors rather than as destinations, can reorganise movement across a much larger landscape. The pavilions are modest, but the thinking behind them, that a site's dead zones are an opportunity rather than leftover space, applies far beyond a hotel in Yangshuo.

Sugar House + by Atelier Guo (lead architect Liaohui Guo), Yangshuo, Guilin, China. Area: 100 m². Completed 2024. Photography by Ziqian Wang.

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