H3 Flagship Store, Kunming
With the success of the Experience centre in Songming, the client decided to revamp the Flagship store in Yunnan provincial capital city ,Kunming.
This site is located in the city’s busiest building materials retail market. Competition here is extremely stiff and the flagship store needs to be very prominent.
As this is only the second of the eventual long series of retail chain we were designing for the brand, we have to maintain a similar DNA with the predecessor. In our retail branding philosophy, we believe that the Store Identity is of utmost importance as it would be the biggest surface that will catch the eyes of the consumers. The idea is not to replicate, but to evolve the design as we move on to the next store. These design principles has given us the flexibility to work on any kind of plans and building types for the same brand.
The flagship store has 3 storeys. The open concept staircase was reconfigured with a bigger stairwell to allow glimpses of the next 2 floors, encouraging visitors to move upwards once they are in the store.
With a tight footprint, we have decided to dedicate most of the first storey for their biggest selling timber flooring. We have also created 2 giant “live” display windows on the busiest face of the building where passerby view the customers testing the displayed samples inside as “live” mannequins.
The second and third storeys were dedicated for Show “boxes” (sample zones). In order to bring out the perception of uniqueness for each show “boxes” as well as the contents inside, the former were all facing a different angle. This provided an opportunity for us to locate more efficiently- organized product storerooms among the in-between spaces.
Outer surfaces of the “boxes” are expressed as “shells” (cladded with the featured products) with the inside contents (show rooms) being exposed to the visitors.
These show “boxes” belong to one form family injected into the upper two floors.
The “lantern” light fixture was designed and injected into the stairwell to guide the visitors’ vision towards the upper floors.
