Xin Ming Yuen Restaurant by Monique Lee is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2020 Silver A' Design Award in Interior Space and Exhibition Design Competition Category.
SilverInterior· 2020
Xin Ming Yuen Restaurant
by Monique Lee
Client: Xin Ming Yuen
Silver A' Design Award Winner in Interior Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #92036The Design
About Xin Ming Yuen Restaurant
The entrance is a parade of contrasting materials, structures, and colors. The reception area is a space of tranquil comfort. Auspicious patterns encounter playful decorations. Behind is a dynamic bar area within a resting context. Traditional Chinese character Hui pattern led lights adds a sense of futurism. Going through a delicately adorned roofed cloister is the dining area. Decorated with floral, carb fish images, embossed stained glass screens and the ancient herbalist Bai Zi cabinets, it is a visual journey through time and cultural relics in fashion.
The Recognition
About the Silver A' Design Award
Xin Ming Yuen Restaurant is a Silver A' Design Award winner, an extraordinarily prestigious recognition granted to top-of-the-line, gorgeous, and impressive designs. Silver winners are tremendously brilliant and exceedingly creative works that illustrate the outstanding expertise, talent, and acuity of their designers. Xin Ming Yuen Restaurant is expected to be a wonderful, showpiece work that is remarkably professional and profoundly innovative. This Silver A' Design Award-winning design is a highly notable, admired invention that benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Xin Ming Yuen Restaurant is a vastly envied creation that evokes desires, introduces positive feelings, and sparks amazement and wonderment.
Where to Get It
Award-Winning Interior Design Services
We transform spaces into memorable experiences. Our award-winning studio specializes in restaurant, retail, and residential interiors that blend cultural heritage with contemporary innovation. From concept to completion, we create spaces that tell unique stories.
Discuss Your ProjectInterviews
Grand Interview
Your innovative fusion of traditional Chinese elements with modern aesthetics at Xin Ming Yuen Restaurant has earned significant recognition, including the Silver A' Design Award - could you elaborate on how you balanced these contrasting design languages while maintaining cultural authenticity?
Balancing traditional Chinese elements with modern aesthetics was central to our vision for Xin Ming Yuen. We drew inspiration from classic motifs, such as the traditional Chinese brick house, and reinterpreted them using contemporary materials like wood and stone-like varnish. The brand logo, prominently displayed in red, anchors the space in cultural authenticity while serving as a modern design element. By carefully selecting materials that retain the essence of traditional design yet adapt to a modern context, we achieved a harmonious blend that resonates with diverse patrons, ensuring cultural authenticity remains at the forefront.
The entrance of Xin Ming Yuen Restaurant features a striking parade of contrasting materials, structures, and colors - what inspired this bold design choice and how does it set the tone for the dining experience that follows?
The entrance design was inspired by the concept of creating an inviting yet intriguing threshold that reflects the vibrant cultural tapestry of Shanghai, where East meets West. The contrasting materials, such as the wooden relief wall reminiscent of traditional Chinese architecture and the modern glass and steel mesh screen, create a captivating visual dialogue that draws guests into the restaurant. This bold approach not only emphasizes the restaurant's unique identity but also sets an energetic tone for the dining experience. As guests transition through this visually dynamic entrance, they are immediately immersed in a harmonious blend of traditional Chinese aesthetics and contemporary Western influences, preparing them for an exciting culinary journey that celebrates both heritage and modernity.
In reimagining traditional elements like the Hui pattern with LED lighting at Xin Ming Yuen Restaurant, how did you approach the challenge of modernizing classical Chinese motifs while preserving their cultural significance?
Our approach to modernizing the Hui pattern involved a careful balance between innovation and reverence for tradition. By incorporating energy-efficient LED light tubes into the design, we not only maintained the pattern's cultural significance but also embraced an eco-friendly approach. This choice enhances the visual appeal while inviting a new audience to appreciate traditional motifs in a contemporary context. The result is a design that honors its roots and engages with today's aesthetic sensibilities, all while promoting sustainability in our design practices.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- Essence of traditions are reinterpreted in a contemporary manner. It defines generation from different aspects and connects diversities in harmony. Antique connects with modernity, liveliness with peace, east with west, domestic with exotic. Contrasting properties of matt and shiny finish, elevation and indention, relaxation and invigoration provide new visual experience. Together with ancient symbols, patterns, materials and details, each corner is a unique complex of art, culture and fashion.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The site area is 489 sq.m.
- Tags
- Shanghai, China in the 50’s and 60’s, Friends, Lunch & Dinner, Restaurant, Time travel, Multiculturalism.
- Production Technology
- Modern techniques revive ancient design concepts in new materials for a novel visual experience. Traditional Chinese brick walls are changed to wood materials with a brick texture coating. The water jet cutting technology executes mosaic tile auspicious designs onto marble stones. Oxidized mirror effect for a nostalgic ceiling at reception is achieved by eroded steel plate. LED light tubes form a modernized Return pattern on ceiling for soft and even lighting over the bar area.
- Design Challenge
- Since the use of glass ceiling is against the China's law, oxidized mirror ceiling above the reception is replaced by treated steel plate. To achieve the desired effect, much effort and time have been put on applying erosive solutions to get close to the original design. Track lights are added over the bar counter for a stronger lighting effect. We have difficulties in getting exceptional slim and long light poles to go through the gaps among the grid frames of Chinese character Hui pattern.
- Research
- Information regarding eastern and western art, architecture is mainly collected on the internet and from designer's personal collection of books about interior designs and architectural history.
- Inspiration
- Concept is inspired by Hong Kong's East meets West culture. It embraces the finest qualities of a traditional culture passed down in a modern context. It's great attention to fine details is an echo to the restaurant's perfect presentation of food colours, aroma, taste and appearance. Design is a travel through time concept and infused with a nostalgic mood of the old Shanghai Paris in the Orient where Chinese traditions were strongly influenced by modernity. It has lived and evoluted to the present.
- Project Duration
- The project started in November 2018 in Beijing, China and finished in June 2019. The restaurant formally started business in July 2019.
It is located at L1-12, Parkview Green FangCapDi, No. 9 Donadagiao Road, Chaoyang Dist., Beijing, China - Operation Flow
- Memories touch our souls. The design has flashbacks of Shanghai in the 50's and 60's which marks the golden decades of modern China. Traditions passed down through centuries are strongly impacted by Western culture and modernity. Every corner shows traces of history at, before and beyond the period. Customers travel and explore history through different time spaces, feel and interpret their own feelings.
- Patents
- Copyrights belong to Monique Lee, 2018.
- Team Members
- Design Director: Monique Lee
- Image Credits
- Copyright of photos belongs to Xin Ming Yuen.
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