At the moment when online shopping and impulsive consumption habits are rampant, a pure and peaceful boutique shopping space that can make people calm down becomes the starting point for the design of DONLIANG concept store.
House Ficiton’s project, DONGLIANG: The Foundation, is located in the ground floor store of a multi-storey residential building along the street with three facades. There is a distance paved by landscape between the boutique store and the street.
The program is a retail multi-brand concept store and is relatively mature in the domestic fashion industry. Rather than introducing dazzling and complicated decorations into the space to attract consumers, architects created a strong but calm atmosphere based on fundamental structure of the space, corresponding to the operating concept “Timeless” of DONGLIANG.
Leaded by a paving to the main entrance, the circulation of the store extends to the indoor front desk connecting the south and north areas including a collective display area and an individual area for the brand UMA WANG. An additional green belt has been set up along the facade to provide a more pleasant view for passers-by and in-store customers. There is an exit in the southwest corner for staff-only.
The gas pipes outside the façade of the residential building are covered with louvered panels and included in the facades of the store. The openable smoke-exhaust skylights could also be the display windows for residents upstairs to look down.
The paving leads the guests from the outdoor, to the semi-outdoor corridor with screens on both sides playing videos and then to the interior. The hoisted logo light box makes the facade more pure and friendly to the sight of pedestrians.
Ground floor is typical plan of this residential building. The short-limb shear walls in the rough state of the site are directly used as the basis for the functional layout. Then a small amount of concrete structures are added into the store space while block partition walls are built in the northwest office and storage area. The display and sales area is equipped with several light steel keel partition walls with wooden veneer. All of the mirror surfaces are pre-embedded.
The hanging clothes take the walls as the background while shoes, hats, jewelry and other accessories are placed on the display stands.
The uniform height of all the horizontal planes is 800 mm from the indoor finishing floor. Tree trunks, bottoms of the new and old walls and the moving feet of consumers could be seen from the exterior while the landscape and the tree crowns could be seen from the interior. The mirror surfaces on the interior walls provide an immersive shopping environment allowing the guests to concentrate on the goods.
The cantilevered surfaces are supported by old and new concrete piers and are connected by structural beams above. The thickness of the display tables, including the transverse steel frame and the finishing anodized aluminum surface, is 200mm in total. Therefore, all the display stands and jewelry cabinet are designed according to that. The tops are all 1 meter from the floor.
In the reception area, a newly built concrete column and the convex-shape front desk with drawers are intersecting with each other clearly. Floor cabinet is separated from the countertop in order to break the closure of the traditional front desk.
Surfaces of the original shear walls are cleaned, polished and applied with the varnish to prevent scratches and dust. The wooden veneer that meets the fire rating is used cooperating with concrete so that the balance between warm and cold textures is appropriate to set the clothing display off.
Since the single unit of the wooden veneer is along the whole height of the wall, it is more convenient and stable for installation to avoid 45-degree close-fitting and apply tenon joints as well as setting deformation joints.
The two cast-in-place tabletops with lengths of 10 meters and 6 meters are also cantilevered by the original shear walls. The surfaces are not painted, but are colored when the aggregate is being stirred.
Design intervention including the backward ceiling above the shear wall and the groove reserved at the foot of the wall for cleaning, can moderately enrich the layers of the space as making the walls look like the legs and feet of the whole building.
In the north area, materials in different grayscales are applied, dividing the space according to their textures. An immersive atmosphere is realized.
Light strips on the floor and different textures of surfaces increase the sense of vision and bring more spatial layers to the simple clothing display.
The customized seat in each fitting room and the movable seats facing the large mirror outside the fitting room of south area help customers choose and try on clothing more cozy.
The landscape, structure and interior design of the project are closely linked and complement each other. The relationship between indoor and outdoor environment against FMCGs creates a calm and rational shopping experience for this concept store. The vertically and horizontally spatial relationships achieved through forward and backward movements and intersections, become a peaceful and deep backdrop for commodities, light and everything in the space.
Team:
Client: DONGLIANG; Qinhuangdao aranya Real Estate Development Co., Ltd.
Design Company: House Fiction Architects
Design Team: JI Yaqiong; ZHANG Qing; ZOU Zhixuan; XU Xiaotong; CUI Yuanyuan
Design Time: August 2020 - October 2021
Drawing and illustration: AN Jianuo; YU Tong
Copyright of character illustrations belongs to Slowboy
Main Construction and Material：
1. Curtain-Wall Steel Structure
2. SKK architectural coating
3. Cast-in-place concrete
4. Wood veneer
5. Anodized aluminum oxide
