Shakkei, the Japanese practice of framing borrowed scenery as an extension of a designed landscape, rarely finds a more fitting canvas than the Mentougou hills outside Beijing, where the ridgelines of the mountains behind Tanzhe Temple seem to complete each carefully composed view. Beijing Xitan Hotel, opened in 2022 on the restored site of the former Yangpo Yuan Village, was built around that principle. Nikken Sekkei, working with Nomura Garden Laboratory's Kanji Nomura, shaped a 13,000-square-metre landscape of pine, granite boulder, and raked gravel that dissolves the boundary between the hotel's 17 courtyards and the hills beyond them. The entrance, glimpsed at dusk, frames the idea precisely: a backlit portal of bronze-gridded glass set into charcoal timber cladding, ancient pines silhouetted against a blue-hour sky, the whole composition holding somewhere between a Japanese ryokan forecourt and a northern Chinese scholar's garden. Inside the 38 suites, three studios — Tofu Inc., Bond Design Studio, and Tod Design Studio — divided the interior programme between them, producing rooms that move between a warm Japanese sensibility and something more explicitly Chinese in character. Pale oak panelling with amber cove lighting appears in one suite type; in another, a bamboo-lattice ceiling hovers above an in-room onsen carved from dark stone, the bed platform raised on a tatami-like plinth. The fine dining room brings in Calacatta marble and a branching plaster ceiling relief, while a tea room cut with a single wide picture window turns the mountain range itself into the focal point of the space.

1hr drive from Beijing