Amid the everyday bustle of Shanghai's Jiao Zhou road, the high wooden gates of China's first carbon-neutral boutique hotel promise unexpected tranquility in exclusive, sophisticated surroundings. Fashioned from reclaimed materials, including hardwoods, house bricks, and even antique leather suitcases, Urbn Hotels Shanghai offers a glimpse of yesterday's Shanghai, but in terms of outlook and design, it's as modern as they come. It is carbon-neutral, in fact, not just through paid-for offsets but through clever energy-reduction measures as well. It's a retrofit of an old post office, rather than a new build, it re-uses local Shanghai bricks and reclaimed hardwoods, and it features a number of high-tech energy-saving measures, the details of which are frankly too boring to get into. Feeling smug about one's tiny environmental footprint would be cold comfort, though, if the hotel weren't otherwise a fine one. Happily this one is. You'll find king-sized platform beds, walk-in showers and separate stone bathtubs, all the electronic gadgetry you could wish for, and even in-room fitness kits. The location, two blocks off Nanjing Road, places you right in the thick of it, surrounded by more shopping and nightlife options than you'll know what to do with. The owners, a pair of young property developers, have plans for twenty URBN hotels around China — before long, with any luck, it'll be the Chinese complaining about the West's environmental insensitivity.