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The Urban Edit

Super Sneak Peak: Ahn Luh Zhujiajiao

Ahn Luh
This 600 year old building was picked up and moved here. Because they can. 

Honestly, we’re not frequent visitors over in Zhujiajiao, one of Shanghai’s closest watertowns – the crazy tourist numbers and indentikit stores mean we’ve been heading further afield. But we’ve just been introduced to something that might help to change our minds.

Ahn Luh Zhujiajiao
An ‘ambassador for ancient Chinese culture’. Stick a roof like this on it and you’re golden.

After much delay, the new Ahn Luh resort is finally ready to swing open its hefty doors in the first week of January 2016. Counting Aman guru Adrian Zecha among its founders, Ahn Luh is aiming to be the first Chinese company to make a name for itself in the world of super luxury resorts. Will they succeed? The gorgeous main building, a 600 year old Huizhou-style structure that’s been painstakingly moved here from Anhui Province, and the promise of a year-round outdoor pool (the first in Shanghai?) have certainly piqued our interest. We’ll be heading over when it’s fully open to find out more.

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Rendering Change at The Long Museum

Steel Foundryv
Rendering Change at The Long Museum. Picture credit: The Long Museum

We’ve been fans of the Long Museum West Bund from the get-go, its vast halls make for a truly remarkable space and the variety of exhibitions we’ve enjoyed there have been second to none – and that’s before we even get into the eccentric antics of the museum’s owner.

Rendering Change at The Long Museum. Picture credit: The Long Museum
Rendering Change at The Long Museum. Picture credit: The Long Museum

The latest exhibit to open is one of our favorites yet. If you’ve found Chinese ink painting inaccessible in the past, Rendering Change is a rare and wonderful chance to see some paintings from a recent era, all drawn from the private M K Lau collection, and the vast majority were created between 1949 and 1979 as a ‘new China’ emerged. As such, the paintings contain traditional landscapes combined with new themes such as communes, industrial development and political leaders.

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Old Nanjing’s Hidden Art Deco Glamor

Nanjing Deco
Gorgeous Deco details in Nanjing.

We’ve finally recovered from The Shanghai World Congress on Art Deco (by putting our feet up on a 1930s vintage ottoman and lighting a pipe, obvs), but if there’s one thing we learned while co-organising the tours for this rather fantastic forum, it’s that Nanjing has just as much to offer in the Art Deco stakes as Shanghai.

That’s right, Nanjing – or Nanking as it was transliterated back in the day – served as capital of China from 1927 to 1937, and then-president Chiang Kai-shek employed a host of international and foreign talent to turn it into a thoroughly modern metropolis. Whilst our tour, with fifty Art Deco lovers in tow, took in a host of sites, we’ve whittled it down to a few favorite discoveries below: with special thanks to Patrick Cranley and Tina Karagaratnam at Historic Shanghai for their extensive research.

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Straight to the KORE

Peninsula Spa BeijingIf there’s one thing we love at Bespoke, it’s, well, bespoke things. So we were delighted to discover a new massage at The Peninsula Spa that’s more tailored than any other we’ve tried in Beijing.

Called KORE (that’s, er, Kinaesthetic Optimum Recovery Enhancement to the experts), the treatment draws on Eastern and Western neurologic disciplines to first test your muscle strength (we were asked to raise our legs while our therapist pushed down, and form our fingers into a circle she attempted to break, among other exercises) before using the results to personalize the treatment.

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The Georg

Georg Jensen courtyard
Danish by design, the courtyard at The Georg by George Jensen

The cat is out of the bag and firmly among the Beijing restaurant scene pigeons: the Georg has just opened to subtle-yet-sleek fanfare in a part of town you might be spending more and more time in.

The first concept restaurant from the Danish design brand Georg Jensen, the Georg’s design aesthetic was guaranteed, but this is rivalled – if not outdone – by its modern Danish food.

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Just What Beijing Needed – A Tiki Bungalow Bar

Tiki Bungalow Bar drink
Suffering Bastard, madame?

Stop right there – we know what you’re thinking. A Tiki bar? In Beijing? With grass and parrots on the wall? Must be a short-lived joke, right? Actually, no. This is the real deal. High quality (and high alcohol content) Tiki cocktails in a carefully designed tropical hideaway – this is very much worth putting your grass skirt on for.

We never got over the short, rum-soaked kiss that was the first Bungalow bar. After a brief stint this summer in a hutong, the phone box sized Bungalow bar was promptly shut down. Phoenix like, it has resurrected itself. This time it’s bigger, tiki-er and boozier than ever.

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