Laizhou Distillery Experience Center | AND STUDIO

Firm： AND STUDIO

Type： Commercial › Exhibition Center Hospitality + Sport › Hotel Cultural › Cultural Center Landscape + Planning › Waterway/Wetland

STATUS： Built

YEAR： 2025

SIZE： 100,000 sqft - 300,000 sqft

BUDGET： $50M - 100M

Photos： Dong Images (8), Arch-Exist Photography (3)

Located in Chengdu, Sichuan, China — a historic distilling region shaped by rivers, forests, and agricultural fields — the Laizhou Distillery Experience Center is conceived as a landscape-led project grounded in ecological responsibility. Rather than imposing a singular architectural object, the design emerges from the native woodland, water systems, and agricultural patterns.

The campus accommodates a diverse program including a spirit experience center, tasting halls, immersive exhibition spaces, a small theater, conference facilities, a spirits library, creative workshops, a barrel aging warehouse, an elevated sky bar, and a timber-structured boutique hotel. Instead of consolidating these functions into a single mass, the masterplan disperses them as clustered volumes woven into the forest.

More than 2,000 existing trees were carefully preserved and integrated into the spatial framework. A comprehensive ecological survey identified mature vegetation and historic irrigation networks as primary spatial generators. Previously damaged waterways were restored through ecological rehabilitation, reestablishing natural drainage and reinforcing biodiversity. Traces of the original village fabric and irrigation systems remain embedded within the development.

The decentralized structure avoids monumental hierarchy. Architecture operates as a relational field in which landscape, shade, and water shape the experience more than any individual building.

Inspired by traditional Sichuan dwellings, large pitched roofs and deep eaves create shaded “grey spaces” that mediate climate and encourage social exchange. Local grey schist stone grounds the buildings materially to their context.

Primary structures employ a hybrid steel–timber system, reducing embodied carbon while allowing structural efficiency and long spans. Waste heat from distillery production is recycled to supply the hotel’s hot water system.

Awarded SITES Gold Certification, the project demonstrates how architecture can repair, integrate, and coexist within a living ecological whole.