Shanghai Garden Hotel

This trip, I chose to stay at the famous Garden Hotel located on South Maoming Road in Shanghai. This hotel was one of the few foreign-invested five-star luxury hotels in Shanghai during the 1980s and 1990s, and it also carries nearly a century of Shanghai's cultural history, making it highly significant. The original site of the Garden Hotel was purchased by the French Municipal Council in an auction in the early 20th century, and the new French Club was completed in 1926. After World War II, the Shanghai Municipal Government took over the original French Club and used it as the Municipal Cultural Club. In 1985, Nomura Securities invested in and developed the current Garden Hotel, which officially opened in 1990. The exterior architectural style of the hotel's podium (the original site of the French Club) is predominantly French Baroque, although some decorative elements are simplified. For example, the rose window tracery and the lintel above the windows on the podium, as well as the volutes of the Ionic columns and the Romanesque arches of the second-floor porch, are classic Baroque architectural elements. The marble flooring in the lobby also imitates Baroque style, while the ceiling, walls, and columns' decorations, and the tiled flooring of the exhibition hall corridors lean towards Art Deco style, mainly reflected in the extensive use of brass decorative materials. The guest room tower was developed and built by Nomura Securities, and the wall, ceiling, and carpet decorations in the guest room corridors clearly lean towards Japanese folk style. This includes the partition wall facing the elevator, which adds privacy and reflects the traditional Eastern subtlety in spatial expression, preventing a direct view of the guest room corridor as soon as one exits the elevator. Briefly discussing the guest room layout, the standard rooms of the Garden Hotel still follow the typical star-rated hotel room layout of that time, maintaining a fixed ratio of about 2:7 between the bathroom and the bedroom. Currently, hotel design standards have been updated, and most new luxury hotels no longer adhere to past standards, making the bathroom space more spacious, sometimes even achieving a 1:1 ratio with the bedroom space.