Niccolo Changsha
There is a lift in 长沙国金中心 (Changsha IFS) that takes about fifty seconds to climb four hundred and fifty-two metres, and when it opens you are on the ninety-third floor, in a lobby, above the clouds if the weather is doing what Changsha weather usually does.
This is the check-in desk of 长沙尼依格罗酒店 (Niccolo Changsha). Not the lobby of a hotel — the desk. Because the hotel does not start at the bottom of the tower. It starts near the top. Everything below belongs to somebody else.
Sleeping on the Eighty-Eighth Floor
The Niccolo is a Wharf Hotels property, the Changsha member of a small luxury brand that began in Chengdu in 2015 and has since added Chongqing and Suzhou. In Changsha it occupies the upper reaches of Tower 1 of IFS, the twin-tower complex on 解放西路 that is the tallest thing in the city. The rooms run from the 86th to the 92nd floor. There are 241 of them, including 19 suites.
Every room is a corner in the sky. The windows are full-height and run the length of the wall; the curtains are motorised, which is not a luxury detail so much as a necessary one, because the sun comes up over the Xiang River and a manual curtain would lose. Rooms fall into three families: city view, river view, and suites. The standard entry room, the N1, is about 45 square metres — genuinely large for a city hotel — with a bathroom in Italian marble and a tub set where the view is. The river-view rooms look out over 橘子洲 (Orange Isle) and the bridges; the city-view rooms look at the rest of the skyline, which at that height is a more interesting object than it sounds.
- N1 Deluxe City View — from about ¥1,100 a night; 45 sqm, the entry room
- N1 / N3 Deluxe River View — a step up; looks over the Xiang and Orange Isle
- Explorer and Niccolo Suites — the top of the house; separate living room, roughly 60 sqm and up
Rates move a great deal. ¥1,100 is an ordinary midweek figure and the same room can be two or three times that on a holiday weekend or during a firework night on the isle, so book early and check rather than assuming. Breakfast is charged separately unless it is bundled — the hotel runs packages that fold in breakfast, dining credit and upgrades, and those are usually better value than the bare rate.
The Ninety-Third Floor
The whole hotel is arranged around one idea, which is that the interesting part of Changsha is below you and you should be able to see it while doing ordinary things.
The Sky Lobby, the restaurants and the bar are all on 93. 欣厨 (Niccolo Kitchen) is the all-day room — Asian and Western, open kitchen, and where the buffet breakfast happens; it is a serious breakfast by Chinese hotel standards, with a noodle station that people who live in Changsha still queue for. 悦廊 (The Tea Lounge) does the afternoon tea and has the best window seats in the building, facing the river and the mountain. 吧 93 (Bar 93) is the evening version of the same view, with cocktails and a large amount of glass.
The pool is not on 93. It is on 6, and it is indoor, 20 metres by 7.5, held at 28°C, with a whirlpool bath, underfloor heating and speakers underwater. That last detail is either ridiculous or perfect depending on your mood; at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday it is perfect. There is a gym on the same floor and a Niccolo spa.
The 4th and 5th floors connect straight into the IFS mall, which means you can go from your room to a shopping centre with a hundred and one thousand square metres of it without crossing a road or, if you time it well, seeing daylight.
The Location, Which Is the Real Argument
尼依格罗’s pitch is not really the tower. It is 解放西路 188 号 — the middle of the 五一广场 district, which is where Changsha actually happens.
Walk out and you are on 解放西路, the street the city goes to at night. 太平街 and 坡子街, the two old food streets, are within a few minutes on foot. The metro at 五一广场 is a few hundred metres away, which puts 橘子洲 two stops and 岳麓山 three in the other direction. Roughly: 3.7 km to Orange Isle, 4.1 km to Yuelu Mountain, about 2 km to 文和友, around 3.9 km to Changsha South railway station, and 26 km to Huanghua airport.
The honest trade-off is noise. You are sleeping above the loudest district in the city, and on a Saturday night 解放西路 is loud until late. The rooms are high enough and glazed well enough that this is mostly theoretical — but if you are a light sleeper and you have chosen a city-view room on a weekend, you have chosen badly.
Who It’s For, and What It Costs
This is the splurge. Changsha is an unusually cheap city to eat and travel in, and the Niccolo is the one place where you can spend the money you saved. If you want the photograph of the city from above, the pool after a day of walking, and a bed that ends the argument about where to stay, this is it.
What it is not: a Changsha experience. Nothing about the Niccolo is local except the view of it. You will eat a competent international breakfast, sleep on a very good imported mattress, and learn precisely nothing about the city — which, for one or two nights in a long trip, is exactly the right thing to want.
If you are weighing it against the alternatives: the 长沙君悦 (Grand Hyatt) down on 湘江中路 is the other big-five-star choice, lower, riverside, closer to 坡子街 but without the tower drama or the height. And there are courtyard guesthouses in the 潮宗街 district that cost a third of the price and will teach you more. Choose the Niccolo when the point of the stay is the stay.
flowcloud would say that a hotel four hundred and fifty metres up is a machine for making a city look manageable — and that the test of a good one is whether you still want to go down and walk in it the next morning.
Where to stay: 长沙尼依格罗酒店 (Niccolo Changsha), 解放西路 188 号, 长沙国金中心 Tower 1, 芙蓉区 — the Sky Lobby is on the 93rd floor. Rooms from about ¥1,100, higher on weekends and holidays. Metro line 1/2 to 五一广场, a few hundred metres. Walk to 太平街, 坡子街 and the 五一广场 district; two metro stops to 橘子洲.
