Platinum Interior Space and Exhibition Design · 2020
Yunxi Characteristic Restaurant
by Shang Cai
- A' Design Award 2020 Platinum Winner in Interior Space and Exhibition Design
- Awarded April 15, 2020
- CLIENT: Yunxi
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 307,014
- Verification code B6007481DC · Verify this award
About Yunxi Characteristic Restaurant
Yunxi is a restaurant interior designed for daily dining and for private parties. The interior covers 600 square meters with a floor height of 6 meters and includes 150 table seats and two private rooms. Water is the design theme, and light is the main design element. Scenes of rain, water, cloud and fog are placed in different areas. Stage lighting methods highlight themed devices against a large black background. Cloud shaped table lamps descend when guests are seated. An intelligent lighting system adjusts colors for different events.
Situated within contemporary trajectories of experiential hospitality design, Shang Cai's Yunxi Characteristic Restaurant exemplifies a sophisticated synthesis of atmospheric installation art and functional dining architecture that transforms gustatory experience into multisensory environmental encounter. The designer appears to engage deeply with phenomenological approaches to spatial practice, creating an interior that prioritizes experiential immersion over conventional restaurant typologies, inviting patrons into what might be understood as a luminous grotto or crystalline underwater realm suspended between dream and waking perception. The technical achievement evidenced in the ceiling installation deserves particular recognition, as the fibrous white material creates extraordinary textural complexity suggesting natural phenomena including frost formations, coral structures, or aerial cloud masses rendered in permanent architectural form. The chromatic strategy demonstrates masterful restraint, employing a limited palette of cool blue tones that saturate the environment with unified atmospheric identity while warm ivory pendant fixtures provide essential thermal counterpoint preventing the space from feeling clinically cold. These organic luminaires, resembling magnolia blossoms or unfurling lotus forms, introduce biomorphic vocabulary that softens the potentially technological atmosphere with references to natural beauty and traditional botanical iconography. The undulating translucent fabric installations threading through the middle ground create spatial layering that suggests veiled mysteries, their serpentine movements frozen in perpetual wave formation evoking water, wind, or breath made visible. The transparent furniture selections amplify the dematerialized quality pervading the design, allowing visual continuity while maintaining functional dining capacity. The floor-embedded LED pathways create processional guidance through the space, transforming movement into choreographed experience. One might consider how this environment proposes dining as ritual journey, each visitor becoming participant in carefully orchestrated atmospheric narrative that elevates nourishment beyond mere sustenance toward contemplative aesthetic encounter.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- The project is a restaurant run by a designer, which is often used for the fashionista to hold parties. Therefore, it needs stronger visual impact and more possibilities of spatial changes. With water taken as the design theme, and through fusion of light and shadow, modelling in space, materials and color, the designer interprets the unique permeability and fluidity of water elements. Thus, rich changes and unique visual effects are presented by the space.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The interior area of the project is 600 square meters with a floor height of 6 meters.
There are 150 table seats and 2 private rooms in total. - Tags
- Interior design, restaurant, dynamic space, water element themes, light and shadow control
- Production Technology
- The designer regards light as the key design element, and by building the interactive relationship between space, light and shadow, a strong sense of rhythm and visual impact are endowed to the static space. It mainly includes the following four aspects:
Firstly, creation of spatial hierarchy: along the entry motion lines, three space with different functions are set, including the entrance winding corridor, reception and restaurant hall. In each space, different levels of multi-dimensional perception are created through the changes of materials, brightness and color.
Secondly, creation of visual impact: stage lighting techniques are applied. In the large area of black background within the main space of the restaurant, theme modelling and devices in the space are highlighted through the accurate light control, forming intense visual impacts.
Thirdly, creation of spatial theme features: through the connection of devices, materials, light and shadow, spatial features of water element themes are created.
Fourthly, creation of multi-purpose space functions: the designer uses the open design method in the main space, matched by the intelligent lighting control system that can adjust colors arbitrarily, colorful space atmosphere with various functions can be created, which can be used with different party scenes. - Design Challenge
- How to express the sense of motion and light for water elements in static space is the biggest challenge.
The designer constructs theme devices such as cloud, rain, ice, water and so on, matched with intelligent controlled dynamic light source and ambient light source, forming interaction between various reflective and transparent materials with different characteristics. Effects such as flowing of rain, ethereality of mist and cloud, the shimmering water waves and so on are vividly expressed. - Project Duration
- Design Period: April 2019 - July 2019
Construction Period: June 2019 - October 2019
Completion Time: October 2019
Project Address: Region A, Liujia Wharf, Beibin Road, Jiangbei District, Chongqing, China - Operation Flow
- The designer uses cloud device made by the artist as table lighting, matched by motors that are controlled by artificial intelligence to realize movement such as lifting. When the guests are seated, the lamps and lanterns above the table will slowly descend to a suitable height, as if to welcome the guests.
The soft light around the table and the black background in surrounding space form distinctive contrast of light and shadow. Intense sense of ceremony and visual impact are created. - Research
- Interaction between light and shadow, as well as space
Creation of spatial atmosphere with water elements
Creation of dynamic effects with water elements
Application of stage lighting technique in space
Ambient light source controlled by artificial intelligence - Inspiration
- Chongqing, where the project is located, is one of the most beautiful cities in China. There are two famous rivers running through the city center, so the waterscape becomes soul of the city's natural beauty and the source of inspiration for the project.
The designer constructs scenes such as rain, water, cloud, fog and so on, which are distributed in different space regions. Various states of water elements are integrated and interacted in space, and becomes impressive spatial characteristics. - Image Credits
- Photographer: Ainiu
- Patents
- The copyright belongs to Shang Cai.
Colors of Yunxi Characteristic Restaurant
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Design Interview about Yunxi Characteristic Restaurant
The inspiration comes from the cloud in the city where the restaurant is located. Chongqing is a low-cloud and rainy city where cloud and fog weather take up most of the time. I tried to express the characteristics of this city in a more modern way.
The main focus of the design is the embodiment of the cloud. I want to use light and substance to see the shape of the cloud, not just the media image.
We try to build such restaurants in diffrent cities in China and all over the world, to achieve the local cultural temperament, in our unique way of using sound and light.
About 2 months.
I think my idea is a good way to fullfill the client's desire of buiding a representative restaurant in the city.
I own the intellectual property rights.
Based on my previous experience in stage art design, I tried to break the barriers of dance design and soft design to make the space more stage and ritual.
The expression of divinity in the works of Tadao Ando is my favorite.
People with good aesthetics and high budget.
The dynamic and variable dance technology makes this space full of vitality and magic, surprising everyone who walks into this space.
The name derives from ancient Chinese poetry, which describes a goddess' beauty as the moon. The homonym Yunxi of this word represents the aggregation of clouds.
Computer hand-painted board is the most useful tool.
The most unique thing is that all the devices on this site can change the position and color to create different effects. I once hosted a dinner for the most famous dancer in China, and allocated her unique peacock-themed lighting.
I designed it independently.
We used MA2's lighting console, digitally controlled fans, digitally controlled lifting equipment and a large number of lighting systems.
The big challenge is how to balance the spatial difference between the naked eye and the photographic equipment, so that both are aesthetically pleasing, so I spent a lot of time in the selection and debugging of the lighting.
By a frend's recommendation.
I have learned a lot, such as how to find a balance between the dynamic and static of the space.