IOI Boutique is a two-storey commercial space located along the street at MixC Aoyun District in Hangzhou. With two street-facing façades, the client envisioned the project as a lifestyle boutique with a gallery-like atmosphere. Rather than pursuing dense displays, the space is conceived with restraint and openness, allowing it to be continuously adjusted, reorganised, and renewed over time—acting as a container that can remain active through change.
Within this framework, the design does not rely on decorative language to define character. Instead, it starts from the openness of the site, its capacity for transformation, and the experience of movement through space. The key question becomes how to accommodate necessary retail and operational functions while preserving the spatial continuity of a large open floor, and at the same time offering a more exploratory way of shopping.
Rather than fragmenting the interior through solid partitions, the design employs precise functional planning and architectural elements to guide movement and sightlines while maintaining overall transparency.
Service and functional areas are carefully organised to release continuous public space at a larger scale. Display systems and furniture are conceived as movable and reconfigurable components, allowing the interior to remain open under different uses and phases. Shopping is no longer understood as a linear process, but as an experience that unfolds through varied scales and directions, encouraging exploration.
The Stair as a Construct: Redefining Vertical Movement
An open, folded, floating stair is placed at the centre of the site, acting as the primary architectural construct connecting the two floors. Beyond its functional role, it operates as the organisational core of the space.
The stair unfolds around the atrium, forming a looped circulation path that defines spatial order without enclosure. In this project, vertical movement is no longer a passive means of connection, but becomes the structural axis of spatial experience.
Along the stair, several suspended platforms allow visitors to pause, observe, and look back at the space from different heights. Viewing becomes part of movement, and the unfolding of the path generates spatial narrative. The stair functions simultaneously as infrastructure, background, and visual focus.
Opening the Interface: A Café Connected to the Street
At the L-shaped street corner, part of the previously sealed glass façade is opened. A 3 × 3 × 3 metre cubic volume is inserted and cantilevered 50 centimetres toward the street, allowing the café to extend from the interior into the public realm.
This clearly defined geometric volume is not conceived as a decorative object, but as a spatial interface. It positions the café as a mediator between interior and everyday urban life, transforming the boutique from a closed retail space into part of the street’s daily rhythm.
The coffee counter serves both inside and outside, operating like a small stage at the corner, where seeing and being seen naturally occur. Along the street, a slightly raised reclaimed wooden platform defines an outdoor zone for informal use. Here, people rest, meet, and converse, blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior, and between formal and informal occupation.
The café offers not only coffee, but also a curated selection of food and drinks, supporting its role as a place for repeated, everyday use rather than a supplementary function.
Shopping as Exploration
Through the combined presence of the stair, the café, and the functional volumes, the space is organised as a sequence of continuous yet non-symmetrical paths and viewpoints. Different spatial scales appear alternately along the route, making shopping closer to an exploration within architecture than a clearly directed act of consumption.
The space does not attempt to dominate content. Instead, it provides a structural framework that supports it—operating simultaneously as a retail interior, an exhibition venue, and a field that can be continuously reorganised and unfolded over time.
