Twenty-six Republican Era garden villas, built in the 1930s and set within a walled 20,000-square-metre compound in Nanjing's Gulou District, form the fabric of Relais & Châteaux The Yihe Mansions. Beijing practice BDT International Design Agency oversaw their conversion and interior fit-out, completed in 2013, with sufficient care for the original fabric to earn a UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Conservation Award the following year. From the exterior, the compound presents as a quiet neighbourhood unto itself: grey-brick villa facades, hipped tile roofs with dormer windows, mature trees threading up between the buildings, the whole ensemble lit at dusk in warm amber that makes the masonry glow without dramatising it. Inside, the interiors translate the compound's historical mood into something more enveloping. Dark-stained timber panelling lines the guest rooms from floor to coffered ceiling, plantation shutters filtering light across patterned rugs and deep-upholstered seating arranged around marble-topped occasional tables. Freestanding soaking tubs sit open to the bedroom in the larger suites, their chrome floor-mounted fittings in a style consistent with the 1930s period of the buildings. The dining spaces work across two distinct registers of atmosphere: a ground-floor restaurant finished in pale linen upholstery and lacquered ceilings, and an attic-level Chinese dining room where the exposed roof structure has been left white and angled dramatically, furnished with natural oak Ming-influenced chairs around dark lazy-susan tables beneath a branching industrial pendant light.