The tension between a curtain-wall tower and a palatial interior is one that Chinese luxury hotels have wrestled with for decades, and the New Jingli Hotel in Nanjing's Yuhuatai District frames that tension with unusual directness. From the street at dusk, the building presents a cool blue-glazed facade articulated by bronze-toned mullions and a swept canopy with brass detailing that signals ceremony without quite resolving the gap between its contemporary envelope and the Beaux-Arts ambitions within. Step inside and the register shifts entirely. A double grand staircase in pale limestone, its treads upholstered in deep royal blue and its balustrades wrought into geometric medallion ironwork with gilt accents, anchors a coffered lobby whose scale borrows from early twentieth-century European palace hotels. The bar beyond it is lined with grey-veined marble columns arranged in arched colonnades, the floor inlaid with Art Deco-inflected geometric patterns in contrasting stone. Guest rooms carry the classical language more lightly — duck-egg blue panelled walls framed by white plaster mouldings, tufted cream headboards on dark mahogany four-poster frames, and pale ash-toned timber floors that keep the palette from tipping into heaviness. The overall effect is closer to a contemporary Chinese interpretation of the grand European hotel tradition than to any specific Western precedent, assembled with considerable material confidence and a deliberate appetite for ceremonial space.

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