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.

Peruse a Jewelry Store Brimming With Festive Flair

2023 Best of Year Winner for International Fashion Retail

For the CTF Guangzhou Experience Shop, the Lion’s Dance performed during Chinese New Year inspired One Plus Partnership to construct approximations of the animal heads from colored metal strips that hang in a pointillist pattern from the ceiling. The jungle king is represented throughout the 6,000-square-foot boutique in other motifs, too, such as the figurative drawings embedded in the terrazzo flooring and the furry seating upholstery and fluffy display boxes that evoke the dancing lion’s mane. Contrasting color schemes of orange-red and blue-green dominate the first and second floor, respectively, chosen as Cantonese symbols of good fortune and expansive energy.

ajax law ling kit; virginia lung wai ki.

A Closer Look at a Trio of Optical Stores by West of West

If anyone is true to their DNA, it is Garrett Leight. His father, Larry Leight founded the esteemed eyewear brand Oliver Peoples back in 1987, now owned by Luxottica. It quickly became a cult favorite thanks to design—not only of the glasses themselves, but of their freestanding shops and sales venues such as Fred Segal (owned by Sandow). In 2010, drawing on inspiration from Leight Sr. and Venice Beach roots, Garrett started his own eponymous company, Garrett Leight California Optical, calling on his UCLA pal Jai Kumaran to give the architect’s nascent studio West of West its first project. Fast forward to present. GLCO has nine stores stretching beyond California’s borders to include Austin and Toronto. West of West, with offices in Los Angeles and Portland, has designed all except the Toronto locale, including a new trio: in Brooklyn, on Mulberry Street in Manhattan, and in the Silverlake section of Los Angeles. In one sense, they are similar. Within a restrained palette, birch plywood predominates taking form as a slatted unit custom designed with shelving and drawers for display and storage. Common, too, are on-site optical labs, the enclosures for fitting and special tinting defined by crisp white tile and tangerine-tinted glass. Yet of course shops differ given sites and locale vibes. Best of all? Two have an area dedicated to Mr. Leight, GLCO’s top-of-the-line collection created as a father-son collaboration. So, Garrett has come full circle. Let’s take a look.

3 Retail Locales Showcase Their Shared Design DNA

Inside Garrett Leight California Optical on Mulberry Street in New York 

At 1,600 square feet, the Nolita shop stands as the largest. It also gives Mr. Leight the greatest visibility via a moody, rose-colored environment calling clientele to the rear. A series of 8-foot-tall fins, clad with metal laminate below an exposed ceiling, defines the area. Meanwhile, illuminated display boxes are set within the fins. Together, these light boxes and the metallic surfaces “enhance the quality of light and shadow as one moves through the store,” comments Kumaran, who shares credit with project designer Mayola Tikaka. Along the way, customers encounter the optical lab in the center and plywood unit along one wall. About the material’s overall predominance, Kumaran calls plywood “an L.A. material at its core, coming from the lineage of the post-World War II era, and used as utilitarian in the 1950s through its use by [Frank] Gehry. I felt like it was a material to tap into and celebrate its associated craftwork.”

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Behind the Design of The Eyewear Brand’s Brooklyn Locale

GLCO occupies 1,110 square feet on the first floor of a corner commercial brick building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The big deal here is a vibrant mural by L.A.-based artist Topher Chin, seen as part of the store-through vista provided by the glass façade along Berry Street. In this project Kumaran takes plywood to new heights as upright structural components for a shelving unit running in tandem with the standard piece designed of horizontally stacked slats hugging a wall in each installation. The optical lab stands behind the display wall, and Mr. Leight is showcased as a dedicated display.

A Crystal Clear Deign Vision Takes Shape in Silverlake, Los Angeles 

Albeit not at the beach, the Silverlake, L.A. setting, a block from the ever-popular Sunset Junction, hits closest to home for Garrett. The 1960’s/‘70’s building had been renovated two years before GLCO leased its 600-square-foot space, and West of West inherited the wood-framed storefront, oxblood-colored exterior tiles, exposed wood-truss ceiling, and concrete floor. Though the limited area precluded a Mr. Leight showplace, Kumaran did create some elements unique to the site. Starting with the pivoting, aluminum-framed light box designed for inside and window graphics. “It’s like a flagpole where the square can rotate into the store or cover the glazing as signage, illuminated as a beacon at night,” he explains. As for product display, the architect introduced new elements into the mix. A freestanding glass-topped unit of painted plywood adds an option, its pop of sage green a complement to the orange glass of the optical lab stretching across the rear. Also new is an expanded collection of related merchandise, its display flexible thanks to a custom pegboard. Speaking of merchandise, we couldn’t resist questioning Kumaran about his personal pick. “I still have the original Brooks frame in champagne.” We’re green—or black or tortoiseshell—with envy.

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Top Designers Redefine Global Shops and Showrooms

Global brands turn to cosmopolitan influences, tactile traditions, and leading design firms to raise the bar in their shops and showrooms stateside and beyond.

5 Striking Retail Designs Around the World

Jaipur Rugs, Dubai, United Arab Emirates designed by Roar

For an entirely immersive experience, the Indian company’s own hand-knotted carpets enliven not only the floors
of the 8,400-square-foot showroom but also its walls and myriad staircases. The latter are steel covered in a gradient of color and lead down to a central hospitality area inspired by ancestral Rajasthani architecture, featuring archways and a custom table of rose-gold legs and a Tundra gray marble top etched with an intricate Jaipuri pattern.

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13 Paix, Paris designed by Laura Gonzalez, Moinard Bétaille, and Studioparisien

Joining New York and London locations, the 32,000-square-foot maison is the main “temple” to the luxury French jeweler, its six levels a place of origin and collective memory, renovated to obtain the highest grade of BREEAM certification. Three floors encompass 10 salons, which are followed by workshops, archives, and a penthouse residence, all capped by glass ceiling over an atrium conceived in the spirit of a traditional Parisian inner courtyard.

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Skypeople, Beijing designed by F.O.G. Architecture

The 2,300-square-foot shop selling ready-to-wear clothing for young professionals combines outer-space and polar-region modes, fashion and architecture into one minimalist whole through fitting rooms lit by color-changing LEDs and surfaces reminiscent of quilted coats. Randomly placed, angled mirrors are intended to change perspectives, spur
inspiration, and echo the bustling energy of urban life.

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Forte Forte, Los Angeles designed by Forte Forte

For their first U.S. outpost, cofounder Giada Forte and art director Robert Vattilana of the Italian women’s clothing, shoes, and accessories label composed a desert vista with a skylit palette reflective of locale via resin-coated flooring, limewashed brick walls, and native greenery. Brass details add Hollywood glamour, while two stacked stones, a nod to a Fischli/Weiss sculpture, were sourced in Palm Springs.

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Ceramiche Ragno, Milan designed by Benedetta Tagliabue-EMBT

Since the heritage ceramics supplier’s name means spider in Italian, the 4,300-square-foot flagship showroom is
a web of marble, cement, and stone inspiration and a kaleidoscopic sequence of rooms, with spinneret-esque wooden displays; jewel-toned tiles arranged into murals of Persian domes, Egyptian minarets, and Roman columns; and a continuous mosaic slab serving as flooring.

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Tomo Design Creates an Intriguing Emporium for MasonPrince 

The Gen Z founders of Chinese online streetwear label MasonPrince, siblings Qiusen, Qiumu, and Qiulin Zhou have always tapped into a vintage sportswear aesthetic for their men’s and women’s apparel, accessories, and shoes. But when the youthful entrepreneurs came to open the brand’s first brick-and-mortar retail store, the concept of old becoming new again took on an entirely different meaning.

Located in the hip Dongshankou district of Guangzhou, China’s third largest city, the shop is surrounded by chic boutiques and a rising artisanal coffee culture. Part of what has made the neighborhood an appealing destination for young people is its da ka quotient—a Mandarin term that literally means to card swipe or check in but is used to refer to places that are popular backdrops for selfies and social media posting—thanks to the preservation of many old Western-style redbrick houses dating from before the 1949 Communist revolution.

A Retail Locale Rich in Instagramable Moments

MasonPrince chose one of those colonial-era houses—the year of construction, 1931, displayed prominently on the roof parapet above the white columns framing the entrance—as a da ka–ready storefront. The Zhous tapped Tomo Design, a studio based in Shenzhen, the nearby boomtown from which the siblings originally hail, to transform the two-story, 5,400-square-foot property, which was being used as a law office, into a retail environment that would take customers on a figurative journey through time and space.

An Interior Design That Transcends Space and Time 

“We created a narrative with an interrupted timeline,” Tomo founder Uno Chan explains, “incorporating a design language that sets up a dialogue between the past and the future.” That dialogue is immediately apparent from the sidewalk, where the traditional Chinese entry gate has been widened and its solid wood doors replaced by a wall of 11 green-gradient glass panels—each bearing a letter spelling out the brand name—which pivot and slide back to open the front courtyard to the street. It sets the stage for the time-shifting experience awaiting inside, one that incorporates the past, present, and future as represented by the years 1931, 2023, and 2231, respectively. These three periods don’t necessarily flow together so much as crash into one another in seemingly random meetings of exposed concrete, reclaimed wood, and polished steel. No single room privileges one era over the others; rather, each is more of a mishmash in which the epochs run concurrently.

Take the reception area just beyond the front double doors, for example, where a glossy white polyethylene mannequin—Chan describes it as “a weird humanoid figure from the future”—sits behind a mid century–style desk equipped with a vintage lamp and typewriter. The surrounding raw concrete walls are partially clad with a tall, corrugated galvanized-steel dado, while the ceiling comprises a checkerboard grid of LED panels along with a large, mirrored section that reflects the wooden plank flooring below.

The Store Interior Reflects a Warehouse-Style Workplace  

The effect of this eclectic mix—the multiple stylistic vibes include retro, utilitarian, fantasy, sci-fi, industrial, vintage, and art deco—is intended to arouse curiosity in young customers who may be interacting with the brand for the first time, to give them an impression of “breaking the limits,” Chan says. “When the present and the past intertwine with each other, it can be a mysterious labyrinth or a boundless universe that invites the wildest imagination.” Though the multidimensional, time-space narrative might seem like something lifted directly out of the Star Wars saga, Chan is adamant that no particular creative work or genre inspired the store’s interiors: “We believe that the elements of the universe can bring a lot of inspiration and we don’t want realistic fragments to limit the possibilities.”

Inside MasonPrince’s Brick-and-Mortar Locale by Tomo Design

TOMO Design: fei xiao; psyun; tie; jason; poom; tin; ching ho

Miami Vibes Come to Madrid for Lady Pipa’s Retail Debut

In just five years, the Spanish ecommerce label Lady Pipa has established itself as the go-to source fashion ideal for special events. Even Queen Letizia of Spain is a fan, wearing a pink and white confection from the brand to a springtime event in the palace this year. Owned and operated by women, with designs flattering to every body type and fabrications more often than not made of sustainable viscose (and recycled polyester garments on the horizon), Lady Pipa ventures off-line and into Madrid with its first brick-and-mortar location.

Inside Lady Pipa’s Madrid Locale Designed by El Departamento

Candy Colors and Glossy Materials Enliven This Cosmetics Store by Leaping Creative

In the crowded Chinese beauty market, Super Seed has carved out a niche by blending plant-based ingredients with those that are laboratory made. For the skin-care brand’s first brick-and-mortar store, Super Seed asked Leaping Creative to conceive an interior that reflects its core purpose—to make products that harness the healing power of nature—as well as its tech forwardness. Design director Zen Zheng and team imagined the 3,300-square-foot shop as a “futuristic farm,” using candy colors and a mix of glossy materials—steel, terrazzo, lacquer—for a stylish sci-fi effect.

Customers step into a foyer that looks like a greenhouse in outer space, where an astronaut peers into a capsule holding luminous flowers. Inside, shoppers are encouraged to become explorers themselves. The heart of the store displays such items as hemp seed face oil on sleek steel islands, inspired by haulage carts, that sit on wheels fixed on illuminated circular tracks. Adjacent thematic rooms aim to build trust with customers and teach them about natural ingredients, such as a “laboratory” for hands-on classes. There, Leaping Creative specified tinted yellow-glass walls and stainless-steel tables topped with cartoon figurines, sending the message that the brand is both scientific and approachable.

Leaping Creative: zen zheng; mindong zeng; chang chen; zijun luo; zhenyu yao; hongzhi wang; zhibin zhu; mindong zeng; zijun luo; zhuji li; ailian wang; jiarong feng; weizhen tan; zixin huang; baiquan yu; shuogan zheng.

Peter Marino Architect Renovates a 3-Story Dior Boutique in Paris, Spotlighting the Brands ‘Inner Essence’

2022 Best of Year Winner for Fashion Retail

Back open after a two-plus-year renovation, Dior’s 50,000-square-foot, three-level boutique—which includes haute couture salons, two eateries, three gardens, and a bookable private apartment—unfolds in a spatiotemporal narrative akin to a theater set, creating what firm principal and Interior Design Hall of Fame member Peter Marino describes as a journey through the “inner essence” of the brand. “It’s not one idea through­out but, rather, walk-through spaces that tell a story, that keep the customer engaged and emotionally connected with Dior from start to finish.”

The concept pays homage to Christian Dior’s love of fine art and plant life with commissioned works, many nature-themed or conveying a sense of movement: Guy Limone’s immersive collage of archival Dior photographs in a café; sliding panels combining jute and gilded gesso by Nancy Lorenz in fine jewelry; Joël Andrianomearisoa’s textile-based Ultime Saison, 2021, anchoring a mezzanine seating area. Sartorial tropes abound—note how the rotunda’s spiral staircase ripples like the train of a ballgown, backdropped by a monochromatic installation of Dior designs through the ages. A stylistic mash-up of eras comingles parquet de Versailles flooring and classic boiserie paneling with vintage furniture by the likes of Gabriella Crespi and Joaquim Tenreiro, plus more than 100 specified materials (pandemic supply-chain issues be damned, Marino notes), from white stucco and French limestone to embroidered silk.

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Relativity Architects Renovates a Decades-old L.A. Warehouse for the Fear of God Label

With the name Fear of God, how could we resist checking out the fashion brand’s headquarters? As starters, the mostly men’s wear company—street luxury for want of a description—occupies 9,730 square feet in a Downtown Los Angeles 1930’s warehouse transformed by Tima Bell, co-founder of Relativity Architects. We couldn’t resist delving into background about the label, too, given that its founder Jerry Lorenzo had a site vision as strong as his fashion statement. 

Sacramento-born to a Major League Baseball player, coach and manager, Lorenzo had no fashion training but did earn an MBA from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He started out in the family business, i.e. sports, working for the Los Angeles Dodgers, then the sports agency CSMG (Collegiate Sports Management Group) in Chicago. When he moved back to Los Angeles, he pivoted to party promotion and soon realized the athletes and celebs attending could certainly do better and hipper in the wardrobe department. So, in 2013 he launched a collection starting with long, drapey T-shirt’s and growing to include classy hoodies and track pants in elevated silhouettes. Eventually, the late, great Virgil Abloh saw the work and introduced Lorenzo to Barneys, which carried the line for seasons.

Fast-forward to present with production expanding from Los Angeles to Italy and the introduction of some women’s pieces as well. Everything bears Lorenzo’s hand, including the boffo collaboration deal he struck with Adidas. Fear of God, which started with $14,000 and is still independently owned, has its collections sold online. As for that name? It stems from the faith-based household of Lorenzo’s youth. Until Bell came on board, operations had been crammed into a 5,000-square-foot site, also a Los Angeles warehouse.

The architect, whose firm counts hospitality, production studios, and multi- and single-family residences to its name, encountered an empty arts district building, gorgeous with six skylights, wide metal openings, and a bow-truss cum waffle-wood ceiling stretching to 26 feet in places. Walls were brick; flooring was concrete pavers. As for program, “we, as architect and client, drew out how it would work,” Bell begins. That meant constructing dividers of varied heights to articulate function areas. “It’s like a city within a city.” 

Headquarters, therefore, are a combination of showroom, design studio, and administrative office. Differing from the norm, they are not open to either the general public or retail buyers. Instead, visitors constitute the high-profile clientele for whom Lorenzo can select production elements displayed in the showroom area and bring them to the contiguous dressing room where the customer can opt for try-on and purchase. Or he can decide to go the custom route à la couture. A conference room for confabs with corporate execs can be open to or cut off from the adjacent kitchen via an enormous sliding door, 8 feet tall and 20 feet long, allowing the conjoined expanse to be used for events and, yes, parties.

The studio is the private domain of Lorenzo and his assistant designers. Private is the operative word since this is the only enclosed room with full-height walls capped by a clerestory for daylight infill. Lorenzo was adamant about both. Of course, artificial lighting also figured into the equation. Bell and his team, comprising co-founder Scott Sullivan, project manager Teresa Martin-Rico, and designer Jasmin Mueller, created suspended fabric scrims guaranteeing an even cast over the worktables, stools, and benches, all custom maple and courtesy of Perron-Roettinger, hired directly by Lorenzo for furnishings. Meanwhile, Lorenzo himself brought in the easels supporting white boards and mirrors crucial to the fashion world.

Crucial, too, is the envelope, which fades into the background. “When you work with a fashion client you have to suspend your own ego,” Bell acknowledges. Thus, the environment is completely grayed out and neutral so as not to detract from the designer’s inspirations, ranging, by the way, from athletes and the music world to even Ralph Lauren. So out went the masonry. “We furred out the brick to drywall with a lime wash finish,” Bell says of its replacement. New drywall partitions are painted with a slight mottled effect. Flooring is a new concrete topcoat. In a sense, the setting is like Fear of God itself, suitably striking yet simultaneously timeless. 

Stantec Helps Upside Foods Demystify the World of Cultivated Meat Production

Upside Foods, the world’s first cultivated meat company, stands out among “food-tech” start-ups with its sustainable tech and transparent attitude towards cellular agriculture (cultivated meat isn’t vegan or plant-based, but produced directly by growing animal cells, without the need for cages or slaughterhouses). The brand ethos is exemplified by Upside’s first production factory, which opened in November 2021. Called EPIC (Engineering, Production, and Innovation Center), the factory is in the heart of Emeryville, California’s vibrant East Bay foodie scene, within walking distance of a Peet’s Coffee outpost as well as ramen and gyro stalls at the Public Market food hall. 

The 53,000-square-foot campus, housed in a former grocery store, was designed to be part of this eclectic neighborhood, its ambience akin to New York’s Chelsea Market rather than a remote meat processing plant, with picture windows along the façade giving neighbors a look into the world of cultivated meat. It features a private dining room, showcase kitchen, open office space, an all-hands amphitheater, as well as research labs and production facilities for food scientists to continue innovation and produce meat for Upside’s first group of restaurant partners. 

For EPIC’s interiors, Upside turned to global design firm Stantec. “I had not heard of Upside Foods before,” recalled Heidi Dunn, Stantec’s senior associate and project manager. “After a quick Google search, I was intrigued.” Dunn and interior designer Isabel Ramirez worked as project leads, closely collaborating with Upside’s leadership team, including CEO and founder Uma Valeti.

“We told Stantec that we were inspired to create a space that served many purposes; where people could take a little break, enjoy a meal, have productive conversations, or just do some heads down work,” says Brett Salmon, director of lab operations for Upside. Thus, a showcase kitchen functions as a gathering space for employees, as well as a place for the in-house chef to demo new products, or even a venue for a private dinner party courtesy of a celebrity chef.

Dunn and Ramirez took cues from hotel lobbies and cafés: multifaceted spaces for meals, productive meetings, relaxation, and of course, celebration—in June, Upside hosted a drag show in honor of Pride in the spacious setting. 

A natural material palette of wood, glass, and bold, black metal was chosen for its clean, modern aesthetic. “The Upside brand was woven through the spaces,” says Dunn, who chose upholstery, paint, and furnishings in an array of cerulean blue, marigold, and moody earth tones to let the black metal accents pop.

Still, the factory setting required some creative thinking. “One of the biggest design challenges was dealing with the large HVAC ductwork and process piping that feeds the cultivation room and labs,” notes Dunn. “Upside loved the look of exposed ceilings, but the ductwork was so large that it was hard to ‘hide’ by just painting it away.” Ultimately, Stantec’s team introduced dropped ceilings where possible, wrapped the ductwork in black fabric and used black paint to draw sightlines downward. Lighting was incorporated in a similar fashion, tucked behind a fabric-wrapped wall panel system.

As pioneers in the environmentally friendly food space, Upside Food’s leadership team prioritized sustainability. EPIC is powered by 100 percent renewable energy, and Stantec followed suit with their design, using locally sourced millwork and choosing biodegradable, heavy metal free upholsteries from suppliers including Luum, Camira and Knoll. Plus, “The task seating incorporates nearly 2 lbs. of reclaimed fishing nets,” remarks Dunn.

Overall, Stantec was moved by Upside’s company culture and mission statement: “Making our favorite food a force for good.” The team partnered with design agency Pearlfisher to create a signature visual experience for EPIC—a magnetic mural, set against a backdrop of burgundy paint and inspired by assemblages of refrigerator magnets. Visitors are encouraged to add their own magnet to the striking vista, contributing a personal memento to the epic artwork.