CLOUD OCEAN • SKY ARK

Perched high on Moon Mountain in Baibei Miao Village in Southwest China, this homestay overlooks a spectacular year-round sea of clouds. Located at one of the village’s finest viewpoints within a 600-year-old indigenous Miao settlement, the project reimagines the conventional viewing platform through the world’s first “Sky Ark in a Sea of Clouds” concept—a celestial harbor suspended between earth and sky.

Rather than treating the cloudscape as scenery to observe, the design creates a vessel-like sanctuary born specifically for the sea of clouds. A cluster of Sky Arks appears to float above mirrored terrain shaped into an auspicious Oriental cloud motif, visually lifting the architecture into the sky while engaging in a poetic dialogue with the ever-changing clouds. Together, architecture, landscape, culture, and clouds merge into an immersive experience, creating the world’s first Sky Ark wonder in a sea of clouds.

Rooted in Baibei Miao heritage, the project primarily employs local timber and stone, inheriting indigenous building traditions adapted to the local climate and lifestyle. Traditional craftsmanship is combined with sustainable strategies and contemporary comfort, allowing the deepest cultural roots to support a forward-looking design vision. Miao cultural motifs, especially the sacred Hundred-Birds totem symbolizing freedom and good fortune, are reinterpreted through contemporary architectural language and woven throughout the Sky Ark experience.

Visitors move through this terraced Sky Ark settlement, where vessel-like cozy gathering spaces, viewing platforms, and photogenic moments unfold one after another, creating a sensation of hovering above the landscape. At night, an AI-driven luminous disc synchronizes with the real moon, evoking the legend of Moon Mountain floating in the sky. During Miao festivals, it transforms into a sacred drum of light, creating a contemporary cultural landmark above the clouds.

Inside, VR-enhanced glass floors create the illusion of floating above Moon Mountain, while lounges, dining areas, reception spaces, cabinetry, and guest suites extend the Sky Ark narrative throughout. Here, visitors are no longer spectators of the cloudscape but active participants in an immersive dialogue between culture, nature, and the heavens.