My Boon is a personal lifestyle retail destination in Seoul’s Gangnam-gu neighborhood. It is a social space that encourages visitors to interact with the objects of the space turning the typical consumer experience into a social experience.
The 6,700-square-foot retail space is at ground level bordered by narrow residential streets and a major thoroughfare. My Boon occupies an “I” shaped floor plan with three distinct environs. These are a juice bar/café, cash wrap and personal accessories gallery, and a main fashion gallery with transformable and physical interactive display that accommodate home furnishings, clothing, and footwear. Each zone is drawn together by employing consistent materiality, flexible lighting, and louvered ceilings add a consistent field across the entire space. The open louvers provide accessibility to the building mechanicals and lighting fixtures. The gradient glass at the cafe is the only element that breaks the ceiling and serves as a visual anchor or frame for the café counter.
A series of frames were developed to highlight the products and evoke a gallery-like environment for the physical space they inhabit. This framing strategy takes a layered approach and begins from the exterior and transitions down to a single product. The two exterior facades are framed within the interior using colored powder-coated steel bands that have been precisely distributed along the windows to provide sun shading, a level of privacy for the users inside through screening, and create a semi-transparent pantone veil to the outside passerby. A second set of metal bands integrates pulsing LED screens near the fashion and apparel offerings, and is visible to passersby inching past in traffic on the nearby boulevard. Beyond the facades, the interior space employs blackened steel vitrines, table displays made of recycled pressed paper, and concrete planks were designed as refined surfaces for the display of goods.