One City, One Beauty | Dongfengyun MGallery Hotel, Mile, Yunnan

01 A Hidden Utopia

Set within Dongfengyun Art Town in Mile, Yunnan, the hotel feels like a quiet passage into another world. Red-brick forms rise through the landscape with sculptural rhythm, replacing the language of steel and concrete with warmth, texture and imagination.

Inspired by Yunnan ceramics, wine culture and bonfire traditions, the architecture carries the hand of sculptor Luo Xu. Time leaves a soft patina across each surface, revealing a design language that is raw, simple and deeply authentic.

02 A Retreat Shaped by Nature

Hidden against the mountainside, Dongfengyun MGallery Hotel offers a calm, sensory escape from the noise of the everyday. Designed by CCD Hong Kong, the project has received 17 domestic and international awards, including the 2022 iF Design Award and the HD Awards for hotel design.

Inside, colour, material and detail are used to create a sense of quiet immersion. cardamia Flexible Stone appears across guestroom bathrooms and the bar area, with Rome Travertine, Guan Canghai and Rattan Rhythm bringing natural depth, refined texture and a subtle sense of history to the space.

03 A Space of Material Harmony

The interior continues the town’s natural, grounded spirit, allowing colour, texture and form to sit in harmony with the architecture.

Curved surfaces are central to the hotel’s spatial language. Traditional stone would have made these forms difficult and costly to achieve, so the designers selected cardamia Flexible Stone: a lightweight, bendable surface material that captures the beauty of natural texture while adapting easily to curved walls and cylindrical forms.

Flexible and Bendable

Soft yet resilient, cardamia Flexible Stone can be applied directly to curved and cylindrical walls. In the hotel bar, the Rattan Rhythm series bends cleanly without cracking, allowing the material to follow the designer’s vision with ease.

Water-Resistant and Moisture-Regulating

In bathrooms and wet areas, cardamia helps reduce the risk of mould, cracking and surface damage caused by humidity. With a water absorption rate of only 8-10%, it supports a dry, comfortable interior environment, even in humid or water-prone spaces.

Lightweight with Natural Texture

At only 3-6 kg per square metre and as thin as 2 mm, cardamia reduces material weight, transport demands and installation complexity. Compared with traditional stone, it can help lower overall costs while still recreating the visual richness of stone, rattan and timber.

Light, flexible and expressive, cardamia gives designers greater freedom to shape surfaces around the space, rather than forcing the space to conform to the material.

Project Information