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Architects: Rafael de Cárdenas
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:Wen Studio
Text description provided by the architects. Rafael de Cárdenas, Ltd. has designed a new store for JNBY’s directional menswear brand, Croquis, in the Sanlitun neighborhood of Beijing. A singular retail experience, Croquis Sanlitun immerses visitors in an environment of playful variation and engaging fluidity.
Extending from the store’s entrance, a corridor of 360° rotatable oaken arches allows for endless, striking reconfigurations, enabling guests to continually discover and rediscover it anew. This flexible corridor anchors an array of modular and mobile furniture throughout the store. At the opposite end of the space, a monumental lantern-like form that houses fitting rooms and recessed displays can be tuned to a spectrum of hues to vary tonality and heighten the mood.
Crafted using a highly distinctive, precision-tuned palette in which elementally evocative materials such as old-growth wood and oxidized copper mesh with sleekly ethereal expanses of a satin mirror, perforated aluminum, and translucent LED screens, the ensemble results in an atmosphere that is equal parts radical dynamism and innate warmth.
