Recently, a comprehensive assessment conducted by the Zhejiang Home-Hotel Evaluation Committee has named a group of 99 homeowner-run hotels, known as home hotels, as the first “silver class” home hotels in the province.
Among these a homestay called “He Piao Xiang”in Xia Village, Fang Qian town, Panan County was listed. The owner of the He Piao Xiang homestay is Hong Hepiao, an on-campus student since the fall of 2016 in the Tourism-Oriented Agriculture programme at the Pan’an branch of the Zhejiang Radio and Television University (Zhejiang RTVU). "Preparing every room with passion and entertaining every visitor with enthusiasm" is how Hong describes his idea of running a home hotel.
Hong Hepiao is outgoing, warm and hospitable. He likes calligraphy, making gadgets, and taking walks in beautiful natural surroundings. To his eye, even a small ordinary stone can give off a unique splendour. "Nature is the best teacher," he says.
Like the other villagers here, Hong Hepiao first set up a hotel in his home because the local government had asked him to do so. At that time, he was a leader in his village, and when the government began urging people to set up homestays, he took the initiative of doing so. He started the renovation work in 2015, and opened his home hotel in September 2016 after about a year of work.
"I didn't invite professionals to design my home hotel. Instead, I found a decorator. I started to think about the design while the work was already in progress. A lot of things came to my mind the night before. I know the concept of "home hotel" is imported from Taiwan and Japan, but after learning about the nature of such hotels, I had my own ideas. I think a home hotel should be designed following one's own creative inspiration. The rooms must have characteristics that reflect the taste of the owner. If they are designed to imitate the rooms in other hotels or guesthouses, the place is no longer really a home hotel", says Hong Hepiao.
The “He Piao Xiang” is a 3-and-a-half storey building in which each floor is uniquely decorated, and every room has its own distinctive features, with themes drawn from the ocean or forest, Japanese-style rooms for best friends, rooms for lovers, family rooms decorated with cartoons, and so on. In the main room on the 2nd floor, Hong Hepiao showcases his wife's dowry on a cupboard, making the room a memento to his wedding. The rooms on the top floor are the most distinctive, and both feature wooden decorations. In one the décor was all hand-made by He Hongpiao from local materials. The wooden wine rack is designed to be user friendly, while the bedside lamp was made from a piece of wood from the mountain. The other room, a well-known room for couples called the Milky Way Meeting Room, has two beds on separate lofts with a curved wooden bridge connecting them, allowing the lovers to meet in the Milky Way, as in the famous story.
In this home hotel, it is evident that Hong Hepiao is creating a dream out of his own life. The flowers, pieces of woods, stones and branches in it are endowed with both natural beauty and the artfulness of the owner. All of the works here, such as the simulated rock slippers and the wooden heads, have been created with great passion, and gained the admiration of visitors.
The “He Xiang Piao” home hotel is part of a demonstration programme in Panan County that has welcomed leaders from the provincial, prefectural and county levels for many visits. In 2017, experts from Taiwan, Japan and the Chinese mainland came to visit and inspect the homestays, bringing both liveliness to the village and income to its residents.
"The reason I have been able to make my home hotel well-known throughout the province is mainly due to what I have learned at the OUC. In the future, I will continue to work hard with the villagers to enhance the quality of their home hotels, and make high-end home hotels a local specialty", says Hong Hepiao.
By Lou Shuangyan, Zhejiang Panan RTVU