01 Origins
Approximately five years ago, WJ STUDIO embarked on a tourism development project in Shengsi County—a remote archipelago perched at sea in the northeastern Zhoushan Islands. The journey to Shengsi remains an expedition: 2.5 hours by ferry from Zhoushan Main Island, 3 hours combined land/sea travel from Shanghai, 4.5 hours via road and ferry connections from Hangzhou, 4 hours from Ningbo via vehicle-passenger ferries. While helicopter and seaplane routes have recently been introduced, Shengsi’s accessibility challenges modern travelers’ efficiency-driven expectations. This geographical seclusion inherently limits its appeal to mainstream tourism—a challenge that would later define our design approach for the Huanglong Island Lighthouse Hotel.

Positioned as a national-level island scenic zone integrating marine culture with island folk traditions, the Shengsi focuses on ecotourism, leisure retreats, and scientific education. Huanglong Island locates at the core development area. During the design team's initial site exploration, the island's distinctive character proved profoundly arresting. The steep rocky landscape has shaped a winding coastline, with stone houses scattered between the fjords and fishing boats drifting on the deep blue sea. However, Huanglong Island is facing a significant challenge related to rural depopulation. A substantial number of young people have relocated, leading to the closure of the kindergarten and elementary school. The remaining fishermen are primarily elderly. Huanglong Island is not an isolated case. China's rapid urbanization over the past three decades has accelerated changes in the demographic structure of rural areas. Without new industrial investment, the consequences of rural aging and declining vitality have become apparent in recent years.

The revitalization of rural islands is a profound issue that concerns ecology, culture, economic development, and social progress. Huanglong Island boasts unique natural landscapes and invaluable cultural heritage, providing a solid foundation for slow-paced vacation tourism. However, the island's limited transportation options and depopulation present challenges for design. How can we attract people to the island and keep them there, while preserving its precious fishing and farming culture?

02 The Three Dimensions of Time
“Is what people see today the same as what prehistoric humans saw?” As the preliminary detailed planning work progressed, the focus of the design project became increasingly clear: how to protect and utilize the natural elements of the ocean, how to integrate the architecture into the existing fishing village settlements on the island, and how to truly allow people to “experience” Huanglong Island? The theme explored by Hiroshi Sugimoto is precisely the deepest impression the design team has of Huanglong Island, and it is also the core of the entire design project: Time.

The design unfolds around the triple dimensions of time as its core concept: · Natural Time: The island's landscape has formed unique topographical features under the natural laws of evolution, which are the most important foundational conditions for the design and the genius loci.

· Historical Time: The lifestyle and social activities of the islanders have created cultural layers, such as Huanglong Island's unique primitive residential settlements and fishing and farming culture. These human habitation behaviors have historically transformed the island's spatial structure, and the resulting cultural landscape accumulation process serves as the design's entry point.

· Human Time: From the first perspective and human scale, by creating a unique spatial experience for each visitor, the island gains an opportunity to attract “new” residents, thereby reconfiguring perceptions of the island fishing village in the context of contemporary population mobility.

- Natural Time
- During the field survey of Huanglong Island, the design team studied the surface features of the island closely. The outline of Huanglong Island is a typical feature of Zhejiang’s coastline. Massive reefs create distinct elevation differences, with lush and dense vegetation covering nearly every inch of rock and soil. Due to years of exposure to fierce sea winds, the island lacks arbor trees, instead featuring clumps of low-lying shrubs and unique island plant species such as sisal, deciduous sea holly, and Crassulaceae family plants. Huanglong Island is located in the North Subtropical Monsoon Marine Climate Zone, characterized by mild winters, cool summers, moderate rainfall, and strong winds throughout the year. In spring, dense sea fog often shroudsthe island, creating a hazy yet captivating landscape where the sky and sea blend seamlessly into view.

During the conceptual planning phase, the design team conducted an in-depth analysis of the existing village layout, road system, and natural resources, ultimately selecting the Dongjutou Village—a promontory extending into the sea on the northeastern side of Huanglong Island—as the potential location for the hotel. This decision established a spatial layout strategy centered on three core hotel clusters: the Lighthouse Hotel, the Cliffside Hotel, and the Village Hotel. The Lighthouse Hotel is situated atop the easternmost reef, where the site’s original topography exhibits complex elevation changes, with a maximum elevation difference of nearly 30 meters. The tides of the sea, the rise and fall of the sun and moon, and the seasonal changes create a landscape where the passage of the natural time, as the genius loci, generates the design strategy.

- Historical Time
- Huanglong Island, also known as “East Sea Stone Village,” features stone houses, stone streets, and stone landscapes that are the culmination of the survival wisdom of the island's early inhabitants in response to the rugged terrain. The dwellings are built in tiers along the mountain slopes, forming a staircase-like structure along the rock ridges. To shelter from fierce sea winds, all residential buildings radiate outward from the harbor on the southwest side of the site. Some houses are scattered outside the main cluster, and there are abandoned military facilities in the central and northwestern parts of the island. A municipal concrete road has been constructed at the entrance of Dongjutou Village, but the internal village roads are simple cement walkways ranging from 1.5 to 3 meters in width. Transportation conditions are rudimentary, and road repairs are disorganized and irregular. However, the original road system has formed a unique spatial form that harmoniously complements the village's residential architecture.

Since most of the buildings have been unused for years, vegetation has overgrown the roads and reefs, making it impossible for the design team to access the village. Clearly, the village's original roads, water, and electricity infrastructure cannot meet the construction, development, and operational requirements of a modern hotel project. The core of the initial design work was to ensure the continuity and regeneration of the site's texture, with the focus on reconfiguring the access routes to the island. The essence of road system reconstruction is a systematic adjustment of the settlement's spatial structure, requiring a comprehensive assessment of the relationship between the existing road network and the master plan. Subsequent overall development efforts must be based on a feasibility study, prioritizing future functional requirements, spatial structure optimization, and the rationality of zoning.

Therefore, during the planning phase, the road system was identified as the fundamental framework of the overall settlement space and became the focal point of the design work. The design team identified several locations with excellent views and distinctive, iconic spaces, and planned a walking route guiding people from Southern Port, passing through multiple residential and village gathering spaces, gradually ascending the northeastern cliffs, and ultimately reaching the lighthouse. Within this walking route, the relationship between the three hotels and the original residential buildings was clearly defined, forming the foundation for subsequent master planning. From a historical perspective, the design work seeks to connect the future with the past through the existing landscape, ensuring that the continuity of history is preserved.

- Human Time
- The design aims to create an immersive experience that begins upon arrival on the island, ensuring that the entire journey is rich and immersive. The hotel must offer a scenic experience and the visual guidance and flow design become key to the entire spatial sequence.

The walking route from the port to the hotel, as the organizing framework of the spatial sequence, systematically guides visitors' direction of movement and visual focus. At the end of the route, which also marks the beginning of the hotel's spatial experience, visitors' gaze is precisely directed toward the distant lighthouse.

03 Form: Spatial Translation
The overall spatial strategy for the hotel follows the spatial scale of the original village and organizes the spatial order based on the topographical elevation differences. The original dwellings on the island typically range in size from 60 to 180 square meters, with a relatively small scale. The primary building material is yellow brick and stone, which offers good structural strength. The layout of the buildings follows the natural terrain, with no particular emphasis on orientation. The design avoids the building becoming a visual focal point, instead integrating it as an extension of the natural topography and existing village fabric. Therefore, the main building is anchored between three original protected reefs. This layout allows the building's volume to blend harmoniously into the site environment, significantly reducing the presence of artificial structures within the natural landscape.

The architectural massing of the Lighthouse Hotel is organized according to the distribution of reefs and the steep terrain within the site, decomposed into a series of staggered, stepped modules. This stepped layout strategically adapts to the slope of the mountain and generates multi-angle views of the landscape.The massing and form of the building complex respond to the texture of the adjacent existing primitive residential settlements.

The volume of the modern building echoes the primitive reef in another way. The design uses isolated foundations to suspend the solid space above the reef, further reducing the sense of weight. The smooth bottom surface of the building and the rough, angular surface of the reef create a distinctive gray space, adding interest to the landscape.

The building complex conforms to the steep mountain terrain, with only two relatively flat rock formations. The core area of the hotel is naturally divided into two groups, connected by an outdoor walkway that naturally descends along the mountain ridge. The design uses a sensory rhythm of “hidden-peek-open” and multiple transformations between “outdoor-indoor” and “indoor-outdoor” to represent the original experience of traveling across the island.

The design of the route carefully considers the rhythm of spatial sequences from a first-person perspective—the walkway follows the contours of the reef, while the use of partition walls creates a sense of anticipation as the architectural space gradually reveals itself. Halfway along the route, scattered windows reveal fragments of light and shadow from the sea and sky, creating a sense of “peeping”; finally, the path leads through a spiral staircase to a wide outdoor walkway, where the view suddenly opens up—the boundless blue sea and magnificent reefs spread out like a painting, and a moment of “openess” unfolds before your eyes.

Block A is centered around a vast, open rock hall. The weathered, pristine reef stones are preserved at the base of the building, which acts like a “canopy” to protect them, allowing visitors to get up close to the texture of the reef stones. The design blurs the absolute boundaries between “inside” and “outside,” making the space itself a medium that guides the viewer's perception. The treatment of the surrounding walls prompts visitors to mentally associate the outdoor landscape with the serene indoor space, thereby completing the transformation from “outdoor” to “indoor.” When sunlight filters through the skylights onto the rugged rocks, people can experience the texture of the rocks up close and feel the timeless natural creation that endures through the passage of time.

The layout of the guest room units in Block B draws inspiration from the spatial organization patterns of existing villages in the island region. The guest rooms are composed of three relatively independent building volumes, with their spatial orientation and window design strategically responding to the differing sunrise directions in winter and summer to frame specific external landscape views. Through strategically placed full-height windows, the design establishes visual corridors from the interior to the exterior. This approach enhances the permeability between indoor and outdoor spaces, effectively introducing natural light, sea breezes, and environmental soundscapes.

In the design of guest room dimensions, human scale and experience once again become key to the interpretation of time. When the human gaze passes through a clean, unobstructed window, sunlight floods into the room, sea breezes blow in, and the sound of waves instantly fills the ears, completing the transformation from “indoor to outdoor.” When a person pauses before any framed view, time also pauses.

04 Summary
The design of Lost Villa. Huanglong Island Lighthouse Hotel serves as an opportunity to reflect on rural revitalization. The essence of renewal project lies in the reweaving and revitalization of time and memory. Therefore, the intervention does not involve covering the past with steel and concrete but, instead, it transforms the existing local living and production scenes into contemporary narratives that are experiential, empathetic, and sustainable, turning the crisis of island depopulation into an opportunity for a new form of island-specific ecological tourism development centered on deep experiential engagement.