Hasta La Ideas

The window frame of this Beijing boutique by Japanese studio Nendo is repeated into the depths of the store.

Nendo designed the repetitive display system to recreated the experience of flicking through images on the pages of a catalogue.

See all our stories about Nendo here.

Photographs are by Daici Ano.

Here’s some more information from Nendo:

nendo’s a new shop design project in Beijing
“CATALOG” flagship store at Sanlitun Village

“CATALOG” store in Beijing

CATALOG is a Hong Kong-based sports fashion wear select shop with an emphasis on sneakers.

The Beijing store is their first foray into China.

The company’s name, CATALOG, reflects its philosophy:
treating brands with different outlooks equally, and actively suggesting ways of coordinating items from
different brands to its customers.

We wanted to recreate the specificity and attraction of a catalogue in our store design.

A store’s ‘face’ is its windows. We ‘copy-pasted’ the store window over and over again, creating a spatial experience similar to flicking through the pages of a catalogue.

The entire store becomes a series of show windows, and every item is in the spotlight.

If you liked the last monochrome boutique with a checkout in the changing rooms by architect Nelson Chow, here’s another one.

Both stores were completed in Hong Kong for fashion brand Shine, who showcase clothing by different designers.

Visitors enter through a faceted glass facade into a symmetrical gallery room at the front of store, where mannequins model new collections.

Fluorescent tube lights are arranged into star-shaped patterns on the ceiling, while white shelves displaying bags and shoes create bright recesses along the black-painted walls.

A staircase that appears to hover above the floor leads shoppers to the first-floor dressing rooms and sales area, where garments hang from suspended metal grids.

Some other monochrome interiors we’ve featured include a hotel where statues have their heads in the clouds and a boutique filled with fake doors.

Photography is by Dennis Lo Designs.

Here’s some more text from Chow:

Shine Fashion Store

Shine is one of Hong Kong’s most renowned high end multi-brand fashion stores, known for bringing pioneering foreign brands to the trend conscious locals. For the second shop located in the high traffic youth-oriented shopping district of Causeway Bay, the owner specifically requested for NCDA to produce a design that would reinforce the company’s identity as an avant-garde and experimental fashion store.

Inspired by the name of the store, a 7m tall asymmetrical glowing star-like structure forms the primary street identity along Leighton Road, attracting both pedestrians and motorists.

The pristine white shell embodies a black interior wall that further unfolds to create three main rooms: The entrance gallery, the upper level sales area & finally the dressing room. Equipped with 3 display platforms and suspended mannequins, the entrance gallery acts as an extension of the window display and forms a stage for the evolving seasonal Merchandise displays.

The crystalline black wall unfolds to form a suspended stair leading to the upper level sales area, and a row of geometrically arranged fluorescent lights is placed above the stair to emit a cool futuristic sci-fi glow which goes in line with the progressive spirit of the clothing.

The upper level sales area showcases the men’s and women’s ready-to-wear collections in the black crystalline niches on both sides.

Special attention is given to the display of the latest pieces, which are suspended on two central uplit racks. Pieces from various designers are presented against a monochromatic background.

A continuous metal edge above each niche allows for the flexible placement of magnetic brand tags in order to showcase the evolving selection of designers.

Finally, the dressing room conceals the leather padded fitting rooms and cashier entrances behind a continuously folded kaleidoscopic mirror partition, forming the most intimate and private area within the overall shop.

Inspired by music videos and computer generated effects, the dressing room enclosure creates a ‘hyper-real state’, where the customer can see multiple reflections of themselves at different angles in the mirror.

The back lit stretched ceiling creates a false sense of depth to the 2m headroom yet provides abundant light to the person trying on the clothes.

The design of the Shine flagship store in the Leighton Center showcases how the idea of a ‘shining star’ could be translated architecturally into a fashion retail space, creating a visually striking yet highly functional contemporary store.

Project Title: Shine Fashion Store
Location: Shop G09, 77 Leighton Road, The Leighton Center, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
Design: NC Design & Architecture Ltd. (NCDA)
Design Team: Nelson Chow (NCDA)
Client: Shine Trading (HK) Ltd.

Architects Eureka have made a bicycle shop in Hong Kong where recycled paper tubes can be pushed in and out to make an ever-changing display wall.

Eureka were inspired by the Pinscreen executive toy, creating a wall of 5,412 recycled paper tubes so that products can be cradled in, nestled into, rested against or hung off a display that is different each time.

The crinkly silver façade of the shop is made from sheets of creased recycled laminated paper.

The bicycle shop also acts as a flexible space for film nights, parties and cycling-related events for bicycle lovers.

A swivelling desk at the back of the shop can be rotated to the side to free up extra space.

The sliding shop front allows events to spill out onto the street whilst the extendible concrete plinth behind can be used as a window display box.

Here’s a little more information from the architects:

The client is young company which promotes anything and everything bike related in the rather non-bicycle friendly city of Hong Kong. To increase their market exposure, we were approached to design their first retail shop (SPREAD by GUM). The client’s brief aims to shift away from the traditional “bike-shop” model, but rather operates closer to a “Gallery / Event Space” which is more in-tuned with their marketing direction.

They need a space which can be dressed up holistically every month in a different theme to showcase their products, messages and events. Inspired by the Pin Art toy, the PLAY and DISPLAY wall was developed as a concept to amalgamate the functional need of a shop and the fluidity of a gallery / event space. 5412 recycled paper tubes of 38.5mm Ø was used to create a display wall which can be totally customised to suit the products on display or the theme of the month (may be just a bold message!).

Products can be indented into, leaned against, cradled in or hung on this wall like a 3D wall mural. To contrast this, the rest of the space was treated simply with bare white walls and a dark grey polished concrete floor. The table is hinged which can be turned and rest on top of the floating cabinet to create a bigger space in the shop for events or display use.

The space is also used as a socialising hub for like-minded customers and friends, where film nights, parties and cycling related events will be held regularly. An extendible concrete plinth (known as the STAGE) was introduced by the open-able glass shop front, allowing activities to spill out onto the street and videos projected onto the adjacent walls.

The STAGE will double up as a shop window display box, like a stage set in theatre in front of the unobstructed glass shop front. To be consistent with GUM’s green ethos (GUM stands for Green Urban Mobility), the facade was simply dressed with hand creased recycled laminated paper, from the same supplier which produced the paper tubes.

All light fittings used in the shop are LED to reduce the dependency on A/C. Bike parking will be provided in the light-well at the back of the store to encourage customers to visit on 2 wheels!

Location: Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong
Type: retail shop
Year: 2011
Area: 35m2
Cost: HKD180,000

This boutique by Japanese designers Nendo is full of fake doors.

The extra doors break up sight lines in the long narrow Indulgi clothes store in Kyoto, meaning customers must explore the interior if they want to see all the merchandise.

Each door forms part of the shop’s display system, sporting rails, hooks, shelving and mirrors.

Back in 2009, architects Ninkipen! created a similarly surreal but more sinister shop lined with eleven fake doors and only one real exit, while Nendo themselves caused controversy among our readers last year with their mental health clinic where none of the doors open so patients and staff must open sections of the walls to move around – see what all the fuss is about in our earlier story or read more about it in the Dezeen Book of Ideas.

You can also watch Oki Sato of Nendo talking about his work in our interview on Dezeen Screen and see all our stories about Nendo here.

Photographs are by Daici Ano.

Here are some more details from Nendo:

Indulgi

A new shop “INDULGI” designed by nendo opened in Kyoto, Japan. A small clothing shop in Kyoto’s Nakakyo district.

The deep, narrow space has good sightlines, but this can be dangerous, too: a shop can look messy and the interior space simply uninteresting if visitors can see all its products in one glance.

We decided to add shielding elements to create a space that could never be seen in its entirety, one in which different elements appear and disappear from view, changing customers’ experience of the shop as they move about it.

Walls create an over-strong sense of pressure, and the space already contained a number of doors, so we added even more doors to it. We set the doors open and closed at different angles to control the degree of visibility, and the mix of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ doors gives the space a slight sense of surreality.

We added functionality to the ‘fake’ doors, using them for hangers, shelving and mirrors, and furnished them with fixtures that spill out from inside in different colours and textures to create even more variation in the space.

Opening one door brings not only surprise but the desire to open the next, creating a space that evokes curiosity in all its visitors.

53-1 Takakura Higashi-hairu,
Nakagyo-ku Sanjo-Street,
Kyoto 604-8111

Japanese architect Jo Nagasaka of Schemata Architecture Office has completed another Tokyo store for skincare brand Aesop, this time in an old shoe shop.

Aesop Ginza has a red brick interior, which references the brick-tiled facade that was previously painted over by the upstairs tenants.

Brick courses infill the spaces between wooden shelves where products are displayed, while brick units with wooden surfaces house sinks.

You can see more Aesop stores here, including the other Tokyo store by Jo Nagasaka made from materials of a demolished house and a kiosk in New York made of 1000 newspapers.

Other projects by Schemata Architecture Office include an office with a slide and a house in a three metre cube – see all the projects here.

Photography is by Alessio Guarino.

Here’s a few sentences from Jo Nagasaka:

We renovated the 35 year shoe shop “Milano Shoes” into new Aesop Shop in Ginza.

The owner of MIlano Shoes put the brick tiles on the facade of the shop to create a “high-quality mood.”.

But when other tenats of upstair moved into the space they hate the bricks and painted them. Then we designed brick interior in honor of “Milano Shoes”.

Address: Ginza, Chuoku, Tokyo
Usage: Shop
Structure: Steel construction
Completion: 09/2011
Floor space: 38.04m2
Construction: Zest