In the ancient walled city of Datong, on the edge of China's volcanic plateau, Beijing-based Ruize Design has spent recent years working on a thousand-year-old building rather than a new one. Cloudspa Sanctuary, a two-courtyard Siheyuan transformed into a healing retreat with private hot springs and basalt-lined pools, has been named LIV Interior Design of the Year - Living Space, one of two top honours in this year's edition.

For lead designer Wenyuan Guo, the project's starting point was the site itself rather than a predetermined concept. The studio treated the Siheyuan's existing structure - its timber framework, its low-ceilinged rooms, the patina of centuries, as material to be read and translated rather than replaced. Local basalt from Datong's volcanic plateau lines the hot-spring pools, chosen so that guests would physically encounter the region's geology rather than simply view it. Guo describes the resulting aesthetic as a "Frontier Lodge," a register drawn from Datong's history as a garrison city - distinct from the more refined courtyard architecture associated with Beijing.

Sustainability, in Guo's account, is inseparable from this approach. Asked how preserving an old building serves the environment differently than constructing a new one, Guo described adaptive reuse as a form of restraint: avoiding the embodied energy cost of demolition and new construction, and working with a building's existing passive design—thermal mass, natural ventilation—rather than overlaying it with new systems. It's a position that echoes a broader pattern across this year's winners, where sustainability appears less as a feature than as a structural condition of the design itself.

On the question of recognition, Guo was measured. The team's reaction to the win was one of considerable excitement, but Guo framed the result less as a marketing milestone than as confirmation that a slow, site-specific design philosophy can hold its own on an international stage. Asked what comes next, Guo pointed not to a pipeline of upcoming projects but to a way of working—staying immersed in place and life, with the expectation that further recognition, if it comes, will follow from that approach rather than precede it.



For Cloudspa Sanctuary, the award functions less as an endorsement of a single building than as validation of a method: that an old courtyard house in a frontier city can compete with the industry's newest builds, and that restraint, applied with care, can be its own form of ambition. 

Discover more on  www.livawards.com