Xinrongji’s Furong Wushuang in Taizhou | DAXIANG Design Studio

In Jiaojiang, Taizhou, the coastal Zhejiang city where the Xinrongji restaurant empire was born, the group’s high-end Hunanese brand Furong Wushuang has opened a new home that turns away from the sea and toward the mountain hearths of western Hunan. The brand, a Michelin-starred member of the Xinrongji portfolio, trades the region’s familiar mountain-and-sea grandeur for something earthier: the smoke and fire of a Hunanese farmhouse kitchen. Designed by Daxiang Design, the 1,695-square-metre restaurant abandons the manor-style monumental narrative typical of large Chinese dining houses in favour of a more intimate, culturally grounded spatial experience, one that plants the culinary temperament of Hunan deep within a coastal city’s dining scene.

The choreography begins at the threshold. The entrance is treated not as a mere point of passage but as a chamber of emotional transition. A courtyard wall shuts out the tempo of the city; bluestone underfoot, the murmur of water, and a palette of deep green and restrained red complete the shift from Taizhou’s everyday rhythm into the imagined landscape of Hunan. The change of material signals a change of place; the slowing of one’s pace signals a turning of the mind. This carefully controlled tempo at the door is the overture to the spatial narrative that follows.

At the heart of that narrative is fire. The restored earthen stove and fire pit are not decorative symbols but the restaurant’s genuinely working culinary core. Replicated stone walls from western Hunan retain their rough-hewn texture, carrying a sense of accumulated time, while the earthen stove, the fire pit and tea brewed around the hearth are placed side by side as three juxtaposed scenes, inserting the smoke and warmth of mountain life into an urban dining room. Fire and smoke become elements of the space that can be watched, smelled and felt.

This commitment to visible cooking culminates in what Daxiang Design describes as a first for Chinese cuisine: a counter-dining format in the manner of Japanese itamae. Guests take seats around the earthen stove and watch the chefs’ entire process at arm’s length. Wok hei, sound, aroma and movement arrive at the table simultaneously. Chef, ingredients, flame and diner converge at a single counter, and the craft of Chinese cooking itself becomes the restaurant’s most important viewing interface.

Structurally, the renovation opened the interior into a light-filled double-height void that binds the two storeys together. The ordering area on the ground floor and the lounge above are linked visually and in circulation, transforming two once-disconnected levels into one continuous narrative as daylight travels from the ground plane up to the roof. Even the dead corner beneath the staircase has been put to work, converted into a fish pond where reflected light plays on the walls and drifting fish add another layer to the vertical connection between floors.

Beyond the open kitchen, the plan gradually tightens. The à la carte area opens generously onto the everyday street side, while private dining rooms withdraw to quieter corners, a studied contrast of the unrefined and the artful. Timber furniture and plain-toned upholstery establish a relaxed dining scale at which an ordinary meal can still become a banquet. The private rooms on the more tranquil upper floor each form their own miniature narrative: the roughness of stone masonry set against the warmth of woodwork, tableware chosen in response to the seasonal rhythms of Chinese cooking, and the vernacular of western Hunan meeting the craft sensibility of Taizhou within a single room.

In Furong Wushuang, Daxiang Design has distilled a regional food culture into architecture: a coastal restaurant that smells of woodsmoke, a counter where fire is the main course of the spectacle, and a homecoming for a brand that returns to its birthplace speaking the dialect of another province entirely.

Project name: Furong Wushuang, Taizhou

Design period: 2024

Completion: 2026

Floor area: 1,695 sqm

Design firm: Daxiang Design

Design team: Jiang Jianyu, Li Shui, Lou Ting, Liu Yongliang, Shen Sicheng, Jiang Zefeng, Jin Jiayu, Chen Rui

Lighting design: Mo Chao

Location: Jiaojiang, Taizhou, Zhejiang, China

Photography: Lu Haha