古墟幻境 | 北京 Looknow 旗舰店空间叙事设计

Location: Guo Mao Da Sha San Qi, 前门 Chao Yang Qu, Bei Jing Shi, China, 100020

Design: Sò Studio

Client: Looknow

Lighting Design: Re-Sense

Floor Area: 545 sq-m

Multi-brand retailer Looknow's flagship store in Beijing takes an alternative approach to experiential shopping, providing visitors with a spatialized narrative of a futuristic depiction of an ancient city in ruins.

Key features

Multi-brand luxury women's fashion retailer Looknow has expanded with the addition of a new flagship store in Beijing. Sò Studio set out to create an immersive shopping experience, transporting customers into a fictitious setting largely inspired by the ruins of an ancient city. Relic-like objects are immediately visible upon entering the space. Detailed mosaic flooring, aged Romanesque columns and broken and tilted sculptures are found at the entrance, guiding patrons to explore the ruin-like environment around them. A slanted sculpture of Venus dominates the interior, while a series of LED screens depict more remnants of the ancient ruins and are superimposed with extraterrestrial touches.

The theme of deconstruction continues throughout the shop. Circular cutouts on the ceiling, referred to by the designers as 'small islands', expose pipes and beams and demarcate different areas . Displays with a purposefully unfinished look reveal the layers of material used to create them. In another reference to ancient civilizations, display countertops appear in a Stonehenge-like image, with large slabs of rock stacked on top of one another. In the fitting rooms, customers encounter the 'sunken sunshine room', which gets its name from orange accents. Tilted backlit ceiling panels with orange-painted stripes cutting through appear like cracks through stone. A large tangerine-hued sofa and other furniture provides a place of rest.

Frame's take

'Staging techniques – whether sincere or ironic – revive the aura and mystery of the product experience, while a monochromatic "dark wave" aesthetic cultivates a thrilling and dangerous energy with libidinal appeal,' we wrote in Frame 145 about the trend towards 'dark retail' spaces. Looknow's Shanghai flagship space embraces this trend through its adoption of an apocalyptic depiction of an ancient city. Among aged elements, the space is punctuated by futuristic components like LED screens and metallic displays. This approach foregoes the traditional form of experiential retail, not requiring the active participation of customers, instead guiding them subconsciouly through the space with a spatialized narrative. 'One can discover and have their own dialogue with the space other than just the act of shopping,' Sò Studio describes.