At 300 metres above Shenzhen Bay, occupying floors 66 to 79 of the Shenzhen Bay Headquarters Super Base tower in Nanshan District, Shangri-La Nanshan, Shenzhen opened in January 2024 as one of the most anticipated hotel launches in China — and one of the most ambitious expressions of Lingnan hospitality culture ever realised at altitude. Designed by CCD (Cheng Chung Design), the world’s leading hospitality interior design practice, the 272-key property was conceived around the poetic concept of “百鸟归巢” — a hundred birds returning to the nest — interpreted as a sky courtyard whose four facades frame four entirely different panoramas: Shenzhen Bay and the South China Sea to the south, the Gulf sunset to the west, World of Intangible Cultural Heritage fireworks to the east, and Overseas Chinese Town Wetland to the north. Zhobai was honoured to be appointed as the one-stop hotel furniture FF&E supplier for this landmark project — producing and installing the complete furniture programme across every guest-facing space of a building that has become, in its first year of operation, one of China’s most celebrated hotel interiors.
Project Overview
The Shangri-La Nanshan occupies a singular position in Shenzhen’s hotel landscape. Connected directly to Shenzhen Bay Mall and steps from the Red Tree Bay South metro interchange — linking Lines 2, 9 and 11 — the hotel serves Nanshan’s extraordinary concentration of technology headquarters: Tencent, DJI, Huawei’s R&D campus and dozens of global tech companies whose senior executives make up a significant portion of the hotel’s in-house corporate clientele. At the same time, its panoramic position and the drama of CCD’s interior design programme have made it a social media phenomenon: a destination hotel in its own right for Chinese and international guests who travel specifically to experience the sky courtyard, the 360-degree views and the Lingnan garden narrative at altitude. Zhobai’s FF&E brief spanned 272 guestrooms and suites, four food-and-beverage venues, over 2,200 m² of meeting and event space, and the hotel’s 77th-floor wellness facilities — all held to CCD’s exacting design specification.
Design Vision: Eastern Spirit, Western Setting
CCD’s design philosophy for the Shangri-La Nanshan — expressed in the Chinese phrase “东意西境” (Eastern Spirit, Western Setting) — proposes a hotel that is unmistakably Chinese in its cultural references while operating at the standard of the world’s finest contemporary luxury properties. The primary design metaphor is the Lingnan (岭南) garden tradition of the Pearl River Delta: the enclosed courtyard, the carved stone screen, the interplay of water, bamboo and filtered light, the sense of a private world of calm within a city of extraordinary energy. Zhobai’s design team worked with CCD’s specification from the very first production drawing, translating the studio’s vision into furniture pieces that carry the Lingnan narrative in their materials and detail — hand-carved lattice panels in solid camphor wood, upholstery in silk-blend fabrics carrying abstract Lingnan botanical weave patterns, hardware in aged brass with a surface texture referencing traditional Cantonese bronze casting.
Lobby & Sky Lounge
The hotel’s sky lobby — arriving guests emerge at the 66th floor after a dedicated express elevator ride — is designed as the first act of the Lingnan garden narrative: a light-filled, plant-rich space in which the distinction between indoor and outdoor dissolves. The central lounge is anchored by a bespoke curved sofa in a warm ivory silk-blend upholstery with hand-embroidered botanical cushion panels, surrounded by a composition of round marble-top tables in aged brass bases and individual rattan-back armchairs in a jade-green cotton linen. Carved camphor wood screens — produced by Zhobai’s specialist joinery division — partition the lounge zones without closing them off, creating the visual layering of a traditional Lingnan courtyard within a 66th-floor open-plan space. Every piece of lobby furniture is positioned to frame a view — of the interior garden installation, of the sky atrium above, or of the Shenzhen Bay panorama through the full-height glazing.
Guestroom Furniture Programme
All 272 guestrooms occupy the 67th to 75th floors — a vertical hotel-within-a-tower in which every room is a panoramic observatory. The “annular” layout of the guestroom floors wraps the sky atrium on all four sides, ensuring that no room looks into another and every window faces a major view orientation. This singular architecture shaped every furniture decision: pieces positioned to draw the eye toward the window, not away from it; storage solutions that keep floor space uncluttered; and material choices that warm the necessarily minimal palette required to avoid visual competition with the view.
Deluxe Rooms (43 m²)
The hotel’s entry-level Deluxe rooms set a quality baseline that most five-star properties reserve for their mid-tier category. Zhobai specified a bed platform in solid walnut with an upholstered headboard in a heavyweight silk-blend fabric carrying a subtle Lingnan orchid lattice pattern — a reference to the carved stone panels of a Guangzhou courtyard garden. Integrated floating bedside shelves carry wireless charging pads and recessed directional reading lights. The signature birdcage minibar unit — a CCD design icon for the property, referencing the “hundred birds” concept — was fabricated by Zhobai’s specialist joinery team as a bespoke piece: a hand-lacquered cylindrical cabinet in ebony-toned timber with a domed top and a fine brass wire mesh outer casing, housing the room’s minibar within a piece of decorative sculpture. The writing desk is a full-width honed stone composite slab with a recessed cable-management channel, positioned flush against the floor-to-ceiling window to deliver an uninterrupted view while working.
Bathroom Design
Bathrooms across all guestroom categories are furnished to a specification that matches the room’s decorative ambition. Zhobai supplied a freestanding bathtub in honed white Carrara marble composite — positioned at the window in rooms where orientation permits — with floor-mounted brushed brass tap fittings. The double-basin vanity console is in solid walnut with a hand-ground stone basin top and an integrated LED mirror spanning the full vanity width. The Lingnan carved screen motif recurs in the bathroom as a hand-cut stone tile pattern in the shower surround — a detail that required close coordination between Zhobai’s furniture fabrication and the main contractor’s tile installation teams to achieve the precise material interface CCD’s specification required.
Executive Suite (86 m²)
The Executive Suite’s 270-degree bay view orientation — simultaneously capturing Shenzhen Bay, the South China Sea horizon and the western Gulf sunset — demanded a living zone composition that honours the panorama without subordinating the interior. Zhobai supplied a bespoke modular sofa in a deep jade silk-blend velvet arranged in an L-configuration to face the corner glazing, a custom cocktail table in hand-shaped suiseki stone with a solid brass base, and a pair of Lingnan-inspired barrel chairs in a hand-blocked cotton print. The suite’s dedicated study zone features a custom writing desk in lacquered ebony with a hand-applied gold leaf geometric border — a piece that reads as art as much as furniture when the laptop is closed.
Dining Furniture
The hotel’s four food-and-beverage venues each express a distinct dimension of the Lingnan hospitality narrative. The flagship all-day dining venue Ji · 66 on the 66th floor — a Lingnan garden courtyard transported to altitude — was furnished by Zhobai with a programme designed to feel as much like a garden pavilion as a restaurant: dining tables in pale ash with a hand-rubbed oil finish, woven rattan dining chairs with a padded back cushion in a soft jade linen, and a central island banquette in a warm terracotta silk weave framed by hanging botanical installations. The warm-toned lounge and café zone adjacent to the lobby received a contrasting furniture character — deep amber leather club chairs, smoked glass side tables and a custom café counter in hand-lacquered cabinetry with a live-edge stone top — creating an intimate contrast to the garden restaurant’s openness.
Banquet & Meeting Spaces
The hotel’s 2,200 m² of meeting and event space — spanning five rooms including a grand ballroom — operates with the natural light and sky-high views that no ground-floor convention centre can offer. The grand ballroom, configured for gala dinners, high-profile corporate launches and intimate luxury weddings, was furnished by Zhobai with a full banquet package: long imperial-style tables in dark hand-lacquered timber for the property’s signature “sky banquet” dinners, and the full round-table banquet programme for conventional conference and wedding formats — 72-inch tables in book-matched ebony veneer, ballroom chairs in a pale gold silk with hand-stitched back panels, and a portable staging system in lacquered ebony that matches the room’s architectural finish. The meeting rooms were furnished with Zhobai’s executive conference table in solid walnut with integrated cable management, executive leather chairs in a deep cognac, and bespoke credenzas in a camphor wood veneer with carved lattice door fronts.
Wellness: The 77th Floor Sky Sanctuary
The hotel’s wellness facilities on the 77th floor — an indoor heated pool, a fitness centre, a spa and a yoga studio — occupy a position that transforms the act of exercise into a panoramic spectacle. Zhobai furnished the pool surround with a poolside leisure package: sun loungers in marine-grade aluminium with a hand-woven rattan wrap on the frame, side tables in a powder-coated bronze finish with a smoked glass top, and poolside privacy screens in a camphor wood lattice panel — a material that connects the pool area’s furniture to the Lingnan screens of the lobby six floors below. The sky fitness centre received a custom equipment-surround console in dark-stained timber and brushed bronze steel, with frameless floor-height mirror panels in a Lingnan lattice-patterned border frame.
The Zhobai One-Stop Process
Delivering a complete FF&E programme for a CCD-designed flagship Shangri-La property in a high-rise tower — where every piece is subject to the scrutiny of one of the world’s most exacting hospitality design practices and one of Asia’s most trusted luxury hotel brands — set the highest standard Zhobai has operated to in its project history. The delivery model ran across four phases:
- Design Collaboration & CCD Compliance (Months 1–4): Zhobai’s senior design team participated in weekly review sessions with CCD’s project team, producing full production drawings, material sample submissions and physical prototypes for every custom piece in the specification. The birdcage minibar unit, the carved camphor wood screens and the hand-embroidered headboard panels each required multiple prototype rounds before receiving CCD and Shangri-La’s joint sign-off. A complete mock-up guestroom was constructed in Zhobai’s Guangdong facility and reviewed in person by CCD’s principal and Shangri-La’s regional quality director.
- Custom Manufacturing (Months 5–11): The project’s exceptionally high proportion of bespoke and handcrafted items — carved screens, hand-lacquered case goods, hand-embroidered textiles — required a dedicated production team of 60 craftspeople working exclusively on this project for seven months. All items underwent the full Shangri-La contract specification test battery plus a supplementary altitude-logistics test: vibration resistance testing to simulate the freight elevator transportation from street level to floor 79 of a 300-metre tower.
- Vertical Logistics & Delivery (Month 12): Coordinating the delivery of furniture to a 79-floor tower in Shenzhen’s Nanshan CBD — with strict building management protocols governing freight elevator access and loading dock scheduling — required Zhobai’s logistics team to work in three-hour freight window slots, seven days a week, over a four-week delivery period.
- On-Site Installation & CCD Sign-Off (Months 12–13): Zhobai’s installation team of 30 technicians completed the full fit-out over seven weeks, with each floor subject to a joint CCD-Shangri-La-Zhobai snagging walkthrough before being released to the hotel’s pre-opening operations team.
Result
Shangri-La Nanshan, Shenzhen opened in January 2024 to immediate critical acclaim — recognised by the Chinese hospitality media as one of the most significant hotel openings in the country’s recent history and celebrated internationally as a benchmark expression of contemporary Lingnan luxury. The hotel achieved full occupancy within its first month and has been booked to capacity on major holiday periods since opening, driven in equal measure by corporate demand from Nanshan’s technology district and leisure demand from guests who travel specifically to experience the sky courtyard and the 300-metre panorama. CCD’s Cheng Chung has cited the Shangri-La Nanshan as among his practice’s most complete realised works — and Zhobai’s furniture production is an inseparable part of that realisation.
Project Snapshot
- Project: Shangri-La Nanshan, Shenzhen (深圳南山香格里拉酒店)
- Designer: CCD (Cheng Chung Design)
- Operator: Shangri-La Group
- Location: Floors 66–79, Shenzhen Bay Headquarters Super Base, Nanshan, Shenzhen, China
- Scale: 272 panoramic guestrooms & suites; 2,200 m² event space; 4 F&B venues
- Scope: Full FF&E — guestrooms, suites, lobby, all-day dining, tea lounge, bar, banquet hall, meeting rooms, pool surround, fitness centre
- Timeline: 13 months from design collaboration to handover
- Opening: January 2024
- Rating: Five-Star
- Services: CCD design collaboration · Prototype & mock-up room · Bespoke handcraft manufacturing · QC · Vertical high-rise logistics · On-site installation
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