Sanya Shiyao Medical Park Makes a Case for Healthcare Without the Hospital Feel

At Sanya Shiyao Medical Park, WIT Design & Research brings healthcare, hospitality and resort living under one roof, using colour, art and landscape to create a gentler setting for recovery.

Words: Aqilah Najwa Jamaluddin

Few spaces carry as many familiar cues as a hospital. Clinical lighting, hushed corridors and an unmistakable sense of order can tell us where we are before a single sign comes into view.

At Sanya Shiyao Medical Park, WIT Design & Research began by questioning how many of those cues were necessary.

Set in Haitang Bay on the southern coast of Hainan, China, the 18,000 sqm medical wellness complex brings clinical care and rehabilitation into an environment shaped equally by the comforts of hospitality and resort living.

Completed in February 2026, the project saw the Beijing based studio oversee architectural renovation, interior design, landscape design, FF&E and artwork installation. At the centre of it all is the idea of de-institutionalisation.

“We don’t want guests to feel like they are patients,” explains Gu Yu, General Manager of Sanya Shiyao Medical Park. Instead, the intention was to create an environment suited to short term recovery and convalescence, where the favourable climate of Sanya could become part of the experience itself.

On the third floor, a vivid yellow running track sweeps through the Cardiopulmonary Health Centre. Its circular route connects indoor and outdoor areas, drawing in sunlight and views across Haitang Bay.

According to WIT founding partner Felix Luo Zhenhua, the team wanted a yellow that would encourage people to move from the moment they stepped out of the lift.

As the programme becomes more clinical, the palette changes with it.

Upstairs, the fifth floor houses the building’s more serious medical spaces, where the energy of yellow gives way to grey blue stone. The softer tone was selected to create a calmer atmosphere, while artworks introduce further colour and form into spaces that might otherwise feel overtly clinical.

Colour therefore establishes the first layer of WIT’s approach. However, removing the institutional character of healthcare becomes more nuanced when the project moves from shared medical spaces into the rooms where guests actually live and recover.

The guestrooms sit at the intersection of those two worlds. They need to accommodate medical services and comply with the material requirements of a healthcare facility, while providing the comfort expected of an upscale hotel.

Medical grade materials are consequently paired with custom bathroom vanities, blackout curtains, soft fabrics and carefully considered lighting. Accessibility and acoustics are integrated discreetly, allowing the practical requirements of care to recede into the background.

For Luo, that sense of comfort is integral to recovery. Guests need to be able to settle in, rest and feel at ease even while professional medical care continues around them.

The same philosophy follows them out of the room and into one of the most ordinary parts of daily life: eating.

Rather than reproducing the familiar medical cafeteria, Sanya Shiyao Medical Park treats its restaurant as a hospitality space. Health focused meals are served course by course, bringing the presentation and ritual of restaurant dining to a menu formulated around guests’ dietary needs.

There is a small detail that perhaps says more about the success of the space than its finishes ever could. Gu observes that guests often arrive at the restaurant formally dressed during their first few days.

Towards the end of their stay, many come down in the loungewear provided by the facility and slippers, lingering after meals to talk and relax.

Somewhere along the way, the behaviour associated with being a patient begins to give way to the ease of being a guest.

Across the landscape, WIT introduced a series of elevated woven pavilions whose generous canopies provide places to gather, rest and listen to music.

Their open structures allow the sea breeze to pass naturally through them, while the form of the canopies was also considered for its acoustic qualities.

It is here that the setting of Haitang Bay becomes especially important. After the controlled environments of the medical floors and guestrooms, recovery opens towards air, light, sound and landscape.

The progression feels fitting for a project conceived around deinstitutionalisation. WIT has not removed the infrastructure required of a medical facility.

According to the project documentation, Sanya Shiyao Medical Park holds a Level 1 General Hospital licence while its guestrooms, dining and recreational facilities were developed to the spatial quality standards associated with star rated hospitality.

Instead, much of that infrastructure has been allowed to sit quietly behind another experience.

Across the building, colour encourages movement or calm, medical requirements recede into comfortable guestrooms, prescribed meals acquire the ritual of dining, and recovery eventually moves outdoors into the coastal landscape.

Together, these gestures offer a different proposition for healthcare design. At Sanya Shiyao Medical Park, the measure of a medical environment extends beyond how efficiently it delivers care to how comfortably people can inhabit it while they recover.

Project: Sanya Shiyao Medical Park
Location: Haitang Bay, Sanya, Hainan, China
Design: WIT Design & Research
Lighting: Clight & TANT
Photography: TOPIA Vision
Completed: February 2026