Shanghai Blackstone M Hotel

Shanghai Blackstone M Hotel

On the south side of Fuxing Middle Road, the street the French Concession knew as Route Lafayette, at its corner with Fenyang Road in Xuhui, stands the Blackstone Apartments, a six-storey block with Baroque curves completed in 1924 for James Harry Blackstone, an American missionary known locally as Song Heli, its infill walls set with the dark stone that gave the building its popular name. When it opened it was called the best apartment building in China, with a heated pool, a ballroom, tennis courts and a roof garden, and its residents included Xiong Xiling, the former premier, and Mao Yanwen, who set up home in Room 36 on the third floor after their marriage in 1935, while the UN relief administration kept offices here after the war. Listed as a protected historic building in 2005, the apartments and the compound behind them were reopened in June 2020 by the developer Xingfuli as Blackstone M+, a music-themed quarter facing the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra’s concert hall, and the hotel, 24 rooms in Building 2 of the compound, is its centrepiece. The interiors are by Huang Quan of the design studio WJID, who completed the work in 2020 in an Art Deco register, keeping the original floor tiles and stair structures and adding a lobby ceiling of interlocking arches and half-arches meant as an abstraction of the shikumen doorways of old Shanghai, a scheme that won an honourable mention at the LIV Hospitality Design Awards. Rooms run from Superiors at 28 square metres to Premiers at 35 and a handful of Classic Suites, with down duvets, a pillow menu, espresso machines, Dyson hairdryers, Marshall speakers and a minibar included in the rate. Breakfast is included and is, in practice, the food programme, dinner being a matter for the compound, where Casa Mia, the husband-and-wife Italian that moved over from Donghu Road, occupies the ground floor of Building 3, and the old apartment hall holds the Nice To Meet You bookshop and a room of vinyl. Staying here means sleeping inside a public place. The courtyards fill at weekends with people photographing the black façade and the curved terrace above the portico, which a television drama made famous, and the compound treats both as attractions, so the hotel’s calm is a weekday and early-morning thing. The official three-star rating reflects a small property without the apparatus of a full-service hotel, not the rooms, which are better considered than the rating suggests. It suits someone who wants to live for a few nights on a plane-tree street between the Conservatory and Hengshan Road, walk to a concert, and use the hotel as a well-designed base for the old Concession. You should not come if you want room to spread out, since the Superiors are compact and guests say so, or a hotel where dinner, drinks and a long evening all happen under one roof, or a quiet courtyard on a Saturday afternoon. You should come for the address, a century of expatriate Shanghai on Route Lafayette, the Symphony across the road, and rooms that carry the building’s history with more care than most of the city’s heritage conversions. The short version: A 24-room hotel in the Blackstone M+ compound on Fuxing Middle Road, Xuhui, behind a 1924 apartment block built by the American missionary J.H. Blackstone, with Art Deco interiors by Huang Quan of WJID and the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra directly opposite.