This Retail Locale For Drones Features A Test-Flight Park

2024 Best of Year Winner for Retail

The flagship location of DJI, one of the foremost producers of camera drones and stabilizers, obviously had to incorporate a test-flight park. The landscaped grounds of this 43,000-square-foot renovated store by Various Associates, now has a spectacular one dubbed the DJI Oasis, with ramps traversing soft lawns that also sprout artful drone-control towers. For the new interior in Shenzen, China, a metal-slat skin traces the building’s irregular pyramidal form, simultaneously emphasizing the dynamic structure and providing solar shading. The four floors offer sci-fi-esque zones for sales, product experiences, customer support, and training, while a grand staircase twists and turns on its way to an alfresco viewing platform on the second floor—a prime spot for watching drones at play.

PROJECT TEAM: QIANYI LIN; DONGZI YANG; HANQUN CAI; YUWEN DENG; ZEBING LI; BENZHEN PAN; CHAO LUO; JUNRUI ZHANG; QIAN XIE; YUE ZHANG.

Embrace The Future At This Spectacular Exhibition Center In Shenzen

For two decades, the 50-story Golden Business Center has been a Shenzhen, China, landmark distinguished by its eponymous hue. A glittering monument from the early days of the Chinese city’s transformation into a global tech hub, the building is an apt site for the Future City Exhibition Center, a 5,770-square-foot space offering a dazzling vision of things to come. Various Associates has given the street-front venue a showstopping facade featuring gold-tinted, cast-acrylic filigree panels mounted on a cantilevered steel frame that overhangs the sidewalk. Standing out like a marquee while integrating with the building’s aureate color, the 98-foot-long structure creates a dappled passageway to the entrance.

Visitors first enter the Heritage gallery—dark and minimalist, with gray marble–clad walls and ceiling—where images from the city’s past stream across a low-platform screen at the room’s center. A spacious hallway leads to the Future gallery, an even larger room with another low platform holding a model of tomorrow’s Shenzhen. Enveloping digital-display walls provide a spectacular light show that cycles from dynamic sunset colors to a static gradient skyline, surrounding the miniature metropolis with an aura of endless space and time. The final stop, a lounge overlooking a planted courtyard, offers a tranquil retreat before returning to the real city outside.

Smell the Flowers in This Award-Winning Beauty Store

2023 Best of Year Winner for Beauty Retail

Florasis, the Chinese beauty brand named as a portmanteau of “flora” and “sister,” sells cosmetics formulated with floral essences. Its recently opened flagship in Hangzhou, China, by Leaping Creative encompassing 13,000 square feet across two floors, is a gallerylike white box lined with clear resin shelves—a nod to the traditional Chinese medicine cabinets that are typically outfitted with mulitudes of drawers of healing herbs. At the entry, a suspended distillation system art piece showcases the extraction process as sculpture. Inspired by the delightful ancient custom of winding stream parties, where guests floated cups of rice wine downstream to one another, it showcases blooms transforming via steam and condensation into beautifying essences.

Zen Zheng; CC Chen; Xiaowen Chen; Mingdong Zeng; Jianhua Ye; Xunfeng Zhang; Zuotao Luo; Zijun Luo; Ailian Wang; Qianhui Yao; Shutuan Lin; Yinjie Li.

Various Associates Looks to Shanghai’s Past to Create a Cosmetics Store of the Future

The Bund has retained an allure ever since the 1920’s, when wealthy merchants and traders began building art deco–style structures beside Shanghai’s bustling Huangpu River waterfront. Thanks to recent revitali­zation efforts, this celebrated and protected stretch now sits proudly in contrast with the twinkling lights and super-tall skyscrapers of the Pudong district on the opposite riverbank.

The tug of old and new, and influences from East and West, have long been present in this important port city and global financial hub. It’s these dichotomies that Various Associates, a studio led by cofounders Qianyi Lin and Dongzi Yang that has a growing portfolio of hospitality and retail projects, kept in mind while designing Haydon Shanghai. Just off the Bund, the Chinese beauty retailer’s first outpost in the city is located in a landmarked neoclassical building steeped in history.

Since 2020, Haydon’s approach to physical retail has involved opening one store in one city at a time (there are now 10 throughout China) and imbuing those interiors with nods to the cultural nuances of each location. For Shanghai, Lin and Yang looked to local architectural heritage and the building’s century-old past for cues, just as they did for the brand’s Hangzhou store. The duo then considered the contemporary city and devised a “circular space station” concept to pair with the traditional motifs and materials. This surprising union creates an aesthetic they describe as “exactly like a Shanghai lady: elegant, modern, with a little bit of futurism and contradiction.”  

“We extracted distinctive Shanghai-style elements, ones that carry the memory of the city’s exotic old houses, and interpreted them through a contemporary lens,” Lin says. “Reliefs, patterned tiles, wood in classic tones, pale gold, dark green—we combined them in a creative manner that recalls the city’s past glory.” The result is an eclectic 6,500- square-foot, two-story environment that’s part retro, part futuristic.

To reach the store, formerly a sports brand flagship, shoppers pass through the building’s grand public atrium. Without doors separating the two spaces, VA aimed to “harmonize” the area where the lobby ends, and the store begins. “We couldn’t insert a totally different style or design language into this 100-year-old building, especially where it faces onto the building lobby,” Yang explains. “Connecting the old and new, and balancing the design between tradition and futurism, was our challenge.”

The main distinction between the two areas is the store’s sci-fi ceiling, which is partly informed by the circular shape of the atrium. Concentric rings and linear beams, patterned with gypsum reliefs that appear lifted straight from a French Concession villa, emanate below a seemingly continuous light box that dazzles the entire store with a laboratory-white glare. “The ceiling reveals a sense of technology and generates a mysterious atmosphere, like a black hole in the universe,” Ling notes.

From the innermost ring hang black letters spelling out the Haydon logo, which crops up in other unexpected places around the store, namely the staircase, its tight spiral form, rendered in traditional walnut, also residential in feel. But it too mixes in 21st-century elements. Regarding the logo, keen-eyed customers can spy it CNC-cut into the stair’s handrails. It appears again topping a column surrounded by the spiral that spins and is fronted in panels of gold-tinted stainless steel.

The staircase also incorporates textured glass banisters, and the same gypsum reliefs found on the ceiling beams and rings. Elsewhere, fluted dark-green leather framed in walnut forms wall panels and display counters that sidle up against stark white surfaces. Curved mirrored counters and additional golden columns reflect the white and green mosaic floor tiles. “The reliefs and patterned tiles were commonly used in 20th-century China, but definitely not now,” Yang says. “They drag the customer into another age.”

VA’s implementation of materials and finishes that evoke either the past or the future, coupled with the firm’s layering of them over one another, yields an overall atmosphere that lands somewhere in the forward-looking present. Speaking of looking, the contrast of yesterday and today is apparent toward the back of the store, where the staircase is partially encircled by a tall, wide partition of mirrored vertical slats. Each slat is angled slightly to form a curving arc, which, like a carnival’s hall of mirrors, stagger and overlap the reflections of the spiral, as well as anyone traveling up or down it.

To get around the city’s strict fire regulations, which limits the amount of fixed furniture, silver capsule-shape cabinets, based loosely on Shanghai’s old trolley cars, are mounted on wheels. The added bonus? The custom displays can be quickly and easily shifted around the upper level when needed.

Through varied visual references and conspicuously juxtaposed elements, Haydon Shanghai conjures memories and sparks imagination. For VA’s “Shanghai lady,” who is ultimately Haydon’s customer, her experience of moving through the store is no doubt like a stroll down the Bund, absorbing both the historic charm and the bold outlook that together characterize modern China.

Various Associates: Suki Li; Ke Chen; Milly Qiu

PIG Design Creates a Retro-futuristic Visual Mix for Shanghai’s GRNDCNTRL

Back in ancient Greece, revelers built theaters on hillsides so the performers could be seen by audiences above. China’s PIG Design looks back to those drama hotspots—not to mention the glitz of Studio 54, the strong forms of Shikumen stone gates, and the futuristic geometries of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Tron”—for GRNDCNTRL, an 18,000-square-foot nightclub in Shanghai’s hip Xintiandi neighborhood.

Founder and design director Li Wenqiang gathered a sharp mix of materials including leather, steel, brass, and jade for the space, which takes advantage of reflectivity to create eye-popping light installations in the lounge and hall-of-mirrors trickery everywhere else. Fittingly for a nightclub, the palette is mostly midnight. “In order to balance the non-reflective and reflective black materials,” Wenqiang says, “all the stitching and structural closure became the biggest problem.” But at a peak moment with a drink in hand and the DJ playing your favorite song as the LEDs trace the contours of the space, consider all problems solved.