On the forested shores of Lake Xianhai in Mianyang, Sichuan — a lake ringed by 46 peninsulas and cloaked in 90% forest coverage — Sheraton Mianyang Xianhai Lake Resort opened in July 2021 as something rarely achieved in the global hotel industry: a world-class brand’s official prototype for a new design generation. Developed under the newly reimagined Sheraton brand by Marriott International, the 342-key property was designated as the Asia-Pacific’s first Sheraton “New Era” flagship — a benchmark property against which Sheraton hotels across the region would be measured and inspired. Its open-lobby concept, Sichuan bamboo-weave interiors, lakeside resort setting and comprehensive family amenity programme made it, upon opening, the most talked-about new hotel in southwest China. Zhobai was appointed to deliver the complete hotel furniture FF&E solution for this landmark project — producing and installing the full furniture programme across guestrooms, suites, lobby, dining halls, banquet facilities and wellness spaces.
Project Overview
The Sheraton Mianyang sits on the edge of Lake Xianhai in the Xianhai National Tourism Resort — a 46-km² protected scenic area 26 kilometres from Mianyang city centre, offering a natural setting entirely unlike the urban-tower hotels that dominate most Chinese Sheraton properties. At 342 rooms and suites across a low-rise lakeside complex, the hotel draws on the resort’s extraordinary landscape — lake views from over 70% of guestrooms, 2,000 m² of lakeside outdoor lawn and terrace event space, and a children’s resort programme anchored by an indoor-outdoor dual fantasy playground — to deliver a complete leisure and family holiday destination that happens also to carry one of the world’s most trusted business hotel brands. Zhobai’s FF&E scope covered every guest-facing space in the property, from the individually specified guestrooms to the &More shared-work lobby and the lakeside terrace dining furniture.
Design Vision: New Sheraton Meets Sichuan
The “New Era” Sheraton design language abandons the traditional hotel lobby — a formal reception hall separating arriving guests from the rest of the building — in favour of an open, activity-rich community space that Sheraton calls the “Social Hub.” At Mianyang Xianhai, this concept was translated through the lens of Sichuan’s extraordinary craft and natural heritage: bamboo-weave ceiling panels reference the hand-woven basketry traditions of Sichuan’s artisan communities; pale camphor wood case goods echo the light, warm timber of a Sichuan teahouse; and the lobby’s signature botanical installations bring the forest landscape of Lake Xianhai’s shore inside the building. Zhobai’s design team worked in close collaboration with Marriott’s regional FF&E standards team and the project’s interior architects to develop a complete furniture specification that honours both the global “New Era” brief and the specific cultural intelligence of a property rooted in Sichuan.
The Social Hub Lobby
The Sheraton “Social Hub” lobby at Mianyang Xianhai is designed around four distinct zones, each furnished by Zhobai as a coherent programme while maintaining visual continuity across the full open-plan space. The primary lounge zone — anchored by a deep modular sofa in a warm ivory performance linen with bamboo-print scatter cushions — faces the lobby’s full-height glazing and the lake view beyond, positioning the landscape as the room’s centrepiece rather than its backdrop. A dedicated co-working long-table zone, furnished with Zhobai’s custom communal desk in pale ash with integrated power and data channels and a series of individual task chairs in a natural mesh back, serves the hotel’s business guests without the formality of a traditional business centre. A quiet acoustic zone — three private telephone-booth structures in pale timber with an upholstered internal bench — provides for confidential calls without requiring a separate room. The lobby café bar area rounds out the Social Hub with a custom counter in hand-lacquered cabinetry and a series of high bar stools and low café tables in a coordinating pale ash.
Guestroom Furniture Programme
All 342 guestrooms are designed in what the hotel describes as “light wood Neo-Chinese light luxury” — a palette of pale camphor wood, warm ivory linens, and subtle Sichuan craft references that creates a calm, restful atmosphere calibrated to the forest-lake setting outside every window.
Mountain View & Lake View Rooms (41–43 m²)
The hotel’s standard room categories — Deluxe Mountain View and Premium Lake View — share the same generous 41–43 m² footprint and differ primarily in orientation and upholstery accent colour. Zhobai specified a Sheraton-standard Sweet Sleeper bed platform in pale camphor wood veneer with a padded headboard in a quiet off-white cotton-linen blend, floating bedside units with wireless charging and integrated reading lights, and a full wardrobe unit in matching pale timber laminate with push-to-open hardware. The height-adjustable work desk — a Sheraton “New Era” brand standard — is fabricated by Zhobai in a pale stone composite surface with an electric motor sit-stand mechanism, paired with an ergonomic task chair in a natural mesh back and padded arm rests. Lake-view rooms receive a deeper sage-green accent cushion set and curtain lining to complement the lake panorama; mountain-view rooms use a softer terracotta accent palette that references Sichuan’s ochre hillscapes.
Bathroom Design
Every guestroom bathroom at the Sheraton Mianyang features the wet-dry separated design — an independent deep-soak bathtub and a separate walk-in rainfall shower — that the Sheraton brand specifies as a standard across its full-service resort properties. Zhobai supplied a freestanding soaking bathtub surround in honed white marble composite with floor-mounted brushed champagne gold fittings, a wall-hung double-basin vanity console in pale grey stone composite with a coordinating LED mirror, and a bamboo-motif towel rail in a matte gold finish that connects the bathroom’s hardware to the Sichuan craft references running through the hotel’s interiors.
Lake View Suites & Executive Programme (86–240 m²)
The suite programme ranges from 86 m² Executive Lake View Suites with 270-degree lake panoramas to the 240 m² Premium Resort Suite with an oversized observation terrace and a freestanding bathtub positioned at the picture window for a direct lake view. Zhobai furnished all suite living zones with a bespoke sofa in a warm jade performance fabric with hand-embroidered cushion panels in a Sichuan floral motif, a round coffee table in hand-shaped travertine with a pale gold base, and a console table in pale camphor wood with a delicate bamboo-lattice carved door front. The suite programme’s observation terraces each received a two-seat teak conversation set with cushions in a botanical-print outdoor fabric — an outdoor living zone that extends the suite’s usable area to the lake’s edge.
Dining Furniture
The hotel’s four food-and-beverage venues each require a distinct furniture character that serves both the programming of the space and the wider resort narrative. The Daily Social all-day dining restaurant — the hotel’s largest F&B venue — was furnished by Zhobai with a programme designed for the full arc of a buffet day: round four-top tables in pale ash for the morning buffet service, a perimeter run of curved banquette booths in a warm camel performance leather for the evening seafood buffet, and a live-station bar counter in hand-lacquered pale grey cabinetry with a honed stone top. The Yue Chinese restaurant received a more ceremonial furniture treatment: round lacquered dining tables with lazy-susan insets in brushed gold hardware, high-back dining chairs in a deep jade brocade with hand-carved camphor wood frames, and six private dining room sets with full bespoke cabinetry in lacquered ebony with bamboo-lattice panel doors.
Banquet & Meeting Spaces
The hotel’s 1,200 m² of indoor meeting and event space — anchored by an 800 m² pillar-free grand ballroom capable of hosting 700 guests in round-table banquet format or 1,000 in theatre configuration — is complemented by 2,000 m² of outdoor lakeside lawn for the garden weddings, team-building events and al fresco banquets that the Xianhai setting makes uniquely spectacular. Zhobai furnished the grand ballroom with a complete Sheraton-specification banquet package: 72-inch round tables in dark walnut veneer, ballroom chairs in a champagne-gold fabric with a pale timber frame, and a portable staging system in lacquered pale ash. The five syndicate meeting rooms received Zhobai’s modular conference table system in pale ash veneer with integrated cable management, executive chairs in a navy blue mesh-back performance fabric, and perimeter credenzas in a matching timber finish. The boardroom configuration received a fixed oval conference table in solid camphor wood with integrated power and data, paired with high-back leather chairs in a warm tan cowhide.
Wellness & Family Facilities
The hotel’s wellness and family amenity programme is a primary driver of its commercial success as northern Sichuan’s leading family resort. The panoramic indoor heated pool — visible from the lake-facing guestroom floors and maintained at a constant 28°C year-round — was furnished by Zhobai with a full poolside package: sun loungers in marine-grade aluminium with UV-stable mesh slings, paired side tables and a family section with lower-profile child-scale loungers in a bright coral fabric. The sky fitness centre, equipped with a full LifeFitness cardio and strength suite and a dedicated yoga studio, received Zhobai’s equipment-surround console in pale camphor wood with stainless steel detailing and frameless floor-height mirror panels in a bamboo-motif border frame.
The Zhobai One-Stop Process
Delivering the complete FF&E programme for the Asia-Pacific’s designated flagship Sheraton “New Era” prototype — subject to the most rigorous Marriott brand compliance review applied to any Sheraton opening in the region that year — required Zhobai to operate at the highest standard of its design, manufacturing and project management capability. The delivery model ran across four structured phases:
- Design Collaboration & Brand Compliance (Months 1–4): Zhobai’s senior design team participated in brand compliance review sessions with Marriott’s global FF&E standards team, producing full FF&E schedules, material sample submissions and 3D room visualisations. As the Asia-Pacific prototype property, this hotel’s specifications were reviewed by Marriott’s global Sheraton brand leadership — not merely the regional team — before any item entered production. A complete physical mock-up guestroom was constructed in Zhobai’s Guangdong facility and signed off at this level before mass production commenced.
- Custom Manufacturing (Months 5–10): All furniture was produced at Zhobai’s ISO 9001-certified workshops. The height-adjustable desk units were subject to 10,000-cycle motor endurance testing before shipment. Camphor wood carved panels underwent moisture-content testing to ensure stability in Sichuan’s humid climate. All upholstered pieces received fire-retardancy certification per GB 17927 and a 50,000-cycle Martindale abrasion test to Marriott’s contract fabric standard.
- Logistics & Resort Delivery (Month 11): All container loads were coordinated to the Xianhai resort site via the Mianyang city road network, with deliveries scheduled to avoid the resort’s peak weekend visitor traffic. On-site staging areas were established in coordination with the hotel’s main contractor to manage the delivery flow of 342 rooms’ worth of furniture through a resort compound under simultaneous finishing trades.
- On-Site Installation & Snagging (Month 12): A Zhobai installation team of 25 technicians completed the full fit-out over seven weeks. As the Asia-Pacific prototype, the final pre-opening snagging walkthrough involved Marriott’s global Sheraton brand team in addition to the hotel’s general management — a sign-off process that Zhobai’s installation quality passed without condition.
Result
Sheraton Mianyang Xianhai Lake Resort opened in July 2021 to immediate industry recognition and strong commercial performance. As Marriott’s designated Asia-Pacific Sheraton “New Era” prototype, the property has since served as the design and operational benchmark for subsequent Sheraton openings across the region. The hotel achieved the highest guest satisfaction scores of any Sheraton opening in China in 2021, with furniture quality, the open lobby concept and the lakeside suite experience most frequently cited as differentiating guest highlights. For Zhobai, the project represents the most significant brand-compliance FF&E programme we have delivered — an Asia-Pacific industry benchmark produced from our Guangdong workshops to global hotel brand prototype specification.
Project Snapshot
- Project: Sheraton Mianyang Xianhai Lake Resort (绵阳首开喜来登酒店)
- Operator: Marriott International — Sheraton brand
- Designation: Asia-Pacific Sheraton “New Era” Prototype Property
- Location: Xianhai National Tourism Resort, Mianyang, Sichuan, China
- Scale: 342 rooms & suites; 1,200 m² indoor event space; 2,000 m² outdoor lakeside lawn
- Scope: Full FF&E — guestrooms, suites, Social Hub lobby, all-day dining, Chinese restaurant, outdoor terrace, banquet hall, meeting rooms, pool surround, fitness centre
- Timeline: 12 months from design to handover
- Opening: July 2021
- Rating: Five-Star
- Services: Design collaboration · Global brand compliance mock-up · Custom manufacturing · QC · Logistics · On-site installation
Planning a resort hotel furniture project to international brand prototype standards? Contact Zhobai to discuss your FF&E requirements.