Capella Shanghai

Tucked into one of the last remaining clusters of shikumen lane houses in Shanghai’s Xuhui District, Capella Shanghai occupies the Jian Ye Li estate in the former French Concession, a neighbourhood of plane tree-lined avenues and layered architectural history. The hotel’s 55 villas are set within restored 1930s shikumen townhouses, three-storey stone-gate structures that once housed expatriate traders before becoming close-knit Shanghainese family residences. Designed by the late Jaya Ibrahim, their multi-level interiors combine 4.5-metre ceilings, redwood-framed windows, and lush inner courtyards with Chinoiserie accents and French-influenced furnishings that reflect the estate’s cultural duality.

Each villa functions as a private townhouse, with separate living, media, and sleeping floors connected by interior staircases. Three-Michelin-starred chef Pierre Gagnaire oversees the restaurant, Le Comptoir de Pierre Gagnaire, while the Auriga Spa’s float pods and moon-phase treatments offer a counterpoint to the French Concession’s vibrant café and gallery scene just beyond the stone gates. The Capella Culturist team arranges cooking exchanges with local families and introductions to craftspeople working in the neighbourhood’s remaining ateliers.

Capella Shanghai’s significance lies partly in what it preserves. The shikumen style once accounted for sixty percent of Shanghai’s housing but has been steadily displaced by redevelopment, and the hotel’s careful restoration of the Jian Ye Li estate keeps a fragment of the city’s residential history alive. Staying here feels less like occupying a hotel and more like being welcomed, briefly, into another era of Shanghai life, the lanes and courtyards carrying a domestic quiet that the rest of the city’s skyline has largely traded away.