Hengshan Moller Villa Hotel Shanghai

Love the old style classy hotel. Room was spacious and had everything. WiFi was bad. Breakfast excellent. Checkout with colin was quick. Easy and very friendly. Will come back next year but will push for room on second floor building number one which appears to be better than where we slept. First floor. Building 2. Pretty dark

A Swedish shipping trader made his fortune and built it in 1936. Gothic and Tudor hybrid with Scandinavian touches is a trip. The gardens are real cool. Worth a gander. Even has tombs for their pet horse and other animals. The Japanese and the KMT had their stations here. Now a hotel.

Unfortunately, our stay at the Moller Villa was not an enjoyable one. There is a school next door to the hotel which blasts the same song every 20-30 minutes. The room seems to have no soundproofing so it would wake us up at around 7:50AM every weekday. It appears that at least half of all rooms face the school. Additionally, the soundproofing means you can hear the neighbouring rooms. I am a pretty heavy sleeper but the person in the neighbouring room was snoring, which made it difficult to go to sleep. The room has both a button and a piece of card that sits on the door handle to say 'Do not disturb' - neither of them mean anything. We had both on, yet the housekeeping staff just let themselves in without warning. One of the times, my partner and I were undressed. Moller Villa is a beautiful building in an amazing location; however, it is not a nice place to stay. I have given the hotel a second star because of the location. I have uploaded videos showing how loud the music from the school is - I cannot stress enough how loud it is in person.

This fairytale-like mansion’s turrets contain a hidden astronomical observatory—its original brass telescope tracked Jupiter’s moons in the 1930s. The stained glass windows were made using medieval European techniques, with cobalt oxide creating that distinctive blue. Beneath the ballroom, a forgotten wine cellar’s brickwork bears imprints from textile mills that once stood nearby. The current hotel preserves a peculiar tradition: room keys are still attached to weighted Nordic-style keychains.