Review: Sandalwood Shichahai Hotel, Beijing
Arrival
We checked-in to the Sandalwood Shichihachi Hotel late in the evening where the historic hutong houses are and where the upper class, literati used to live. I generally enjoy staying in quirky places with a lot of historical richness. The home was beautifully restored and nice and warm (thank God)! With an inner courtyard with a place to chill, have breakfast, read, and drink tea it was utterly charming. Apparently they also host a variety of workshops including dumpling cooking classes!
Just be aware that taxi drivers in China get flustered if you don’t know how to speak Chinese. Most hotels provide maps with translated directions directing the drivers to the right location on their websites or you can email them for one. For hotels like ours, located in a hutong district, drivers may refuse to drive there because they don’t want to drive in narrow streets. Sandalwood is however located close to the end of one of these streets so you can easily walk to the bigger road. At the front desk they have small business cards in Chinese directing taxi drivers to the hotel so you don’t have to worry! They will drop you off at the corner and you can walk yourself to hotel within 2 minutes.
The Room
The hotel was nice enough to give us the largest room although we chose the “mystery room” option. For a cheaper room rate you can take the gamble and get assigned a room when you check in. Seems there weren’t too many people staying there at the time!
Generally there are either “Western” or “Eastern” style rooms to choose from. Our room was technically Western but accented beautifully with antique tables, vases, and dressers. The room was extremely spacious, filled with antiques, and divided between a sitting area and bedroom with an interesting “sunroof” courtyard, which was decorated with a vase of sorts. Made me think of those large jugs traditionally used in Korea to make kimchi! They also thoughtfully left out a few treats for us to try on the bed. It included traditional sweets including rice cakes and sweet bean filling.
Although spacious the bathroom area oddly didn’t have a proper door. So unfortunately for my poor fiance, who immediately dove into bed, light and sounds from the sink and shower may have kept him awake for a bit. Overall, a decent night’s sleep.
Breakfast
Our room rate, booked via booking.com came with daily breakfast! You could choose from a Western or Eastern style breakfast. My philosophy is always choose food that a place specializes in so I took the Eastern. Not sure exactly what everything was but it was delicious!
Essentially the meal included- vegetable and noodle soup, potato croquettes, fried egg, “quiche,” medley of veggies, corn on the cob, and for dessert a fried rice cake filled with redbean paste and some crabapple paste (tart and similar to Japanese “yokkan” in texture).
Overall Rating:
Service – 4/5
Location – 4/5
Breakfast – 5/5
Experience – 5/5
Highly recommend everyone to experience a stay in a traditional home at some point! This was a beautiful hotel to do so. The location is convenient but we ended up taking the taxi because it was so cold out! That being said, the train station is a short walk from the hotel. Service was great during our stay (e.g.- help getting a taxi, directions, having our breakfast packaged one morning because had to leave early) but prior to arrival they were not very communicative via email and had some issues responding promptly. **This post was not sponsored.**