Pierre-Yves Rochon is better known for restoring European grand hotels — the George V in Paris, Claridge's in London — so his commission for The Azure Qiantang, a Luxury Collection Hotel, Hangzhou represented a deliberate pivot: a purpose-built tower conceived from the ground up around a Chinese literary reference. The building takes its name and organizing idea from Memories of the South, the Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi's evocation of Hangzhou's waterways, and Rochon translated this into 24 floors of blue glass cladding whose color shifts with the light in something close to the Qiantang River below. From the aerial images, the tower's curved glass facade steps back toward the riverbank boulevard, its reflective skin reading differently at dusk than at noon — a building that changes character rather than asserting one fixed identity. Inside, the 205 rooms hold a palette of soft periwinkle and warm cream, with gold X-frame benches, molded plaster ceiling details, and ink-wash landscape paintings above upholstered headboards that draw quietly on Song Dynasty aesthetics without reproducing them. The Chinese restaurant floats high in the tower, its floor-to-ceiling glass walls framing the lit curve of the river at night, the interior finished in red-veined marble floors and green leather banquette chairs with brass nailhead trim. The indoor pool is perhaps the most serene space in the building: cream-paneled walls, arched niches, and a mosaic pool floor with submerged botanical motifs that seem to dissolve when the water catches the light.

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