Located in the South of China, Shanghai is covered with green vegetation all year round. This experience shop is in the commercial district of Shanghai 1000 Trees. Designed by British architect Thomas Heatherwick and his team, the whole building itself is planted with more than 70 local species of plants, including thousands of flowers and trees. We took this as our inspiration and combined the concept of lush flowers and plants with the theme of ‘Heritage’ to create a unique experience of space.
We continued to use the ‘Heritage’ theme as the overall shop image, with a wall of safe deposit boxes, each with a unique metal number stamp in the lower right corner of the door. Those numbers have special meanings, for example, number "5201314" is the homophone of "I love you forever" in Mandarin; 1929 is the year when the brand was founded; there are also dates of each day of the year representing birthdays.
Walking into this shop, visitors are immediately attracted by the wall with huge hand painted patterns of plants. There are millions of plants species in nature, and each of them has its own flowers, fruits, leaves and branches. We borrowed the forms of some local plants in Shanghai, such as parasol trees, Yulan magnolia and Chinese tanbark-oak, and then combined them with the long-established Woolen Needlepoint Tapestry, embroidery technique in Shanghai - Threading the needle to form crisscrossing embroidery lines, several distinctive patterns were created in the form of hand drawings, which were made into the overall wall body of the safe deposit box doors. These patterns are embellished in the surrounding solid-colored background to highlight the vigorous life of plants in nature.
The unique carousel jewelry display bar table is also part of the ‘Heritage’ theme collection. The ribbon-like chandelier at the top is a flattened and widened shape of the Woolen Needlepoint Tapestry, which focuses light on the jewelry display pieces. Besides, the jewelry ornaments on the lush green conveyor belt can be rotated, adding a dynamic sense to the space and allowing visitors to appreciate the design of the jewelry in all directions.
The flowers are red, the grass is green, and the sun is shining in spring. We extracted different shades of red and green, which can best represent the flourishing of flowers and trees to present the entire space. You can see a large area of different shades of green extending from the ceiling, walls to the floor, while the red color is organically dotted in it, showing a wonderful scene of nature.
If you take a closer look, you will see that the entire shop uses a lot of interwoven line elements and different colors, which is our interpretation of "Woolen Needlepoint Tapestry", presenting the unique weaving visual effect of embroidery in the whole space. The line pattern of the ceiling is like the sky covered by the interlacing branches of the giant trees; the one of the walls and counters is like the trees interspersed with flowers and shrubs; the one of the floor with marble and terrazzo is like the primitive and mottled earth. Visitors who walk in here would feel like that they were in nature among flowers and plants, selecting the jewelry they want and worthy of being passed down for generations.