HUXINTING TEAHOUSE VIS

The renewal of the HUXINTING brand at Yu Garden is rooted in the contemporary translation and reactivation of a historic cultural asset. Operating under the principle “guard the roots without falling into antiquarianism, innovate without severing the spirit,” the team explored the pavilion as a dual living example: a 240-year-old structure and a 170-year-old teahouse. Modern design language was employed to recode this cultural DNA, completing a transfer from preservation to regeneration.
Rather than resorting to nostalgic pastiche, the brand visual constructs its emblem by distilling the building’s signature “three pavilions and one kiosk” into a single stroke of minimal linework; the outline remains instantly recognizable while the intersecting lines echo the logic of traditional mortise-and-tenon joinery. Colour is drawn from the ink-green often named in scholar-painters’ texts, conveying the slow accretion of tea culture, and is paired with a muted wood-gold that replicates the actual texture of beams and panels, producing a narrative where Eastern sensibility meets contemporary aesthetics. The logotype locks two voices in one frame: the calligraphic inscription by Jiang Fengyi paired with vine-formed numerals “170th 1855–2025.” The creeping vine—an emblem of cyclical life—threads through the date, mirroring the pavilion’s philosophy of “taking nature as mentor” and giving the anniversary a living rhythm.
The renewal, having recodified the visual sign, refuses to stop at the flat graphic: it projects the brand experience into cultural merch, tea-room interiors and digital touchpoints, forging a continuous chain of sensations between symbol and experience. Inside the teahouse, a memory wall narrates key moments; celebrity tea seats are re-fabricated to scale; a cross-sectional mortise-and-tenon model invites visitors to handle the joint that holds the building together. Episodes such as Ba Jin sipping tea or Queen Elizabeth II’s 1986 visit are turned into participatory scenes rather than distant anecdotes. By closing the gap between historical architecture and daily routine, the project shifts the pavilion from an admired relic to a usable cultural coordinate, offering a replicable paradigm for time-honoured brand revitalization.