Indigo Restaurant

Guilin’s scenery is the best under heaven, and Yangshuo is the best of Guilin.” Inspired by the unique landscapes of Yangshuo, the design team interwove natural scenery with cultural history to shape a public realm rich in both cultural depth and lifestyle aesthetics. The brand name “Indigo Restaurant” derives from the proverb “green is born of blue, yet surpasses blue,” rooted in the craft of indigo dyeing, symbolizing the extension of local tradition into contemporary life. Landscape design here goes beyond greening: it transforms nature into a canvas where ancient walls, cascading waters, stone textures, and light and shadow converge to create a stage for living and interaction, enabling visitors to rediscover the bond between culture and nature amid mountains and rivers.

The southern plaza’s ancient wall became the starting point of the design. Its weathered textures were preserved, allowing traces of history to compose a dynamic tableau with the distant mountains: by day, sunlight highlights its solid, timeworn quality, while by night, under illumination, it radiates a tranquil atmosphere. The northern plaza, in contrast, centers on a cascading waterfall, where layered blue tiles and tiles guide streams of water downward in a gentle, even rhythm that masks urban noise, forming a natural soundscape. This imagery was inspired by the poetic scene of fishermen’s lanterns on the Li River, transforming the murmur of water into the background sound of “slow living.” Circulation paths connect the ancient wall, gardens, and waterscape, allowing visitors to experience shifting scenery step by step, as if walking through a living ink painting. The design’s highlight lies in using landscape to express the brand’s lifestyle ethos and cultural imagery, blending nature, history, and modernity into one.