The Waterhouse is a four-story, 19-room boutique hotel built into an existing ex-army building from the 1930’s in south Bund area in Shanghai. The hotel was invested by Singaporean invester, Loh Lik Pen, in 2010.

The hotel has remained concrete walls and bricks from the existing building partially, and Neri&Hu added unique Cor-Ten steel architecture on top of it – this industrial look with mixture of old & new tells the story of fast developing Shanghai city. From the roof-top bar, the guest can see the historical colonial buildings along the river, skyscrapers over the river, or the old lane houses local people still live near the hotel.

The hotel has various room layouts, and each layout has its own characteristics – furniture, lighting, bathroom, window&wall, or balcony. Rather than normalizing the existing floors to make “brand-new” hotel, Neri&Hu chose to tweak it and converted to the design that tells the history. This Neri&Hu’s one of the initial works has simple and contemporary industrial look, which their signature design, but the design has the unique “depth” coming from the history of building, which makes it “only one.”