Sò Studio pursued the concept of “Newborn Island” to curate partitions within the interior for the flagship store of LOOKNOW Beijing, while also in line with LOOKNOW’s new store typology, “shop-within-a-shop”. By inserting a condensed hollow ceiling, “Circles” in a number of measure were formed uncannily to represent different islands, made contrastive with the texture of the floor as certain boundaries to generate spatial experience seamlessly. The correspondence between floor with the ceiling becomes the strategy that defined the interior and unfold the units in a scattered composition, provoking further curiosity in the viewer.
Sò Studio unified the concept of “Newborn Island” throughout the space by referencing the editing method “montage”, as well as applying “superposition, re-analysis, and collage” to different areas, to create new meanings while paying tribute to the values that have defined LOOKNOW since its institution. While customers are browsing the products, it is easy to find the clue of the same materials and color palettes used in the space. With the movement of the space circulation, customers capture different scenes and collage of views, eventually merged to have a complete spatial experience. Applying the “editing” methods with simple design language to enrich the space, it is Sò Studio’s first attempt to design a large open space with unified aesthetics.
The store is entered through, a purposefully settled “Great Entrance”, which collides with the existing structure of the surroundings. The first hints of the interior are suggested to the individual by the overall image of the “relic”, detailed in mosaic floor pavement, offering the clue to further discovering “the dilapidated city”. Broken columns and tilted sculptures create scenes under different scales, which attract customers to meander around and have fun twists in the further experience.
The irregular LED screen installed in the center of the “remains”, vividly shows several consecutive pictures with dilapidated city ruins and red gravels involved, so as to have an object-versus-virtual connection with the slant Venus sculpture, and time interaction with the mosaic floor pavement. Through the combination between visual effect and spatial experience, Sò Studio aspires to apply a holistic design approach to the interior and emphasize a sense of ceremony within. Here one can find the traces of paint saved on the broken columns that enclosed the “remains” by a close glimpse, which infuse a sense of crafting, conveying Sò Studio’s idea of saving up the aesthetics of “craftsmanship”, juxtaposed with time and space, as well as the sense of handcraft and fabrication.
Exploring deeper into the end of the space, one enters the sunken "sunshine room", of which its frame adopts orange hand painting to bring a luminous ambiance. A sense of layering and contrast has been generated by the extension of the pattern carpet to the lower part of the wall, together with the carefully planned circulation and the lighting scheme, conveys the idea that customers are able to have exceptional memories when meandering around the fitting room area, a final focal point of the meticulously curated retail space.
LOOKNOW Beijing is the first attempt of Sò Studio to curate a new shopping mode for a buyer shop by employing the concept of “Newborn Island”. While creating an immersive spatial journey for visitors, we’d also placed an emphasis on saving up some handcrafts in the process of production and the unexpected between the props-making and design, in the end, one could discover and have their own dialogue with the space other than just shopping.
