What if shopping felt less transactional? AIM Architecture and beauty brand HARMAY have explored the question through the duo’s collaborations on past stores, including an outpost in Shanghai’s Hongqiao airport, a shop in Chengdu, and another in Wuhan. For the latest locale in Beijing’s Hopson Mail, the international practice—with offices in Shanghai, Antwerp, and Chicago—looked to warehouses and art handling to rethink retail design as something meaningful and experiential.
The flagship spans two floors, connected via metal stairs that rest atop cargo boxes. Not just decoration, the boxes are integrated into the stairs and hold product. This cleverly merges product display, circulation, and inventory into a single system.
The stairs fall under rows of tubes of light. Stainless steel, glass, polished concrete, and timber form a restrained material palette that set the stage for the gray and industrial interior, warmed by moments of more cargo boxes. Movable metal mesh storage panels offer other display and storage options. The system fully immerses the venue in a sleek warehouse yet still allows the products to shine.
Upstairs, things get slightly more futuristic. A grid of recessed lights set the stage for a check out counter, created out of the continued language of metal beams. The room leads into an area for more product displays with long display sequences and dedicated zones for Korean beauty products.
Here the metal shelving units are brightened with a monochrome blue. The minimal shelves and spare decor ensure these bright departures and the products they display remain the focal point, made all the more engaging and considerate through its alternative display.
“Ultimately, the store proposes a subtle but powerful cultural shift: that the structures we build to house art can teach us how to better house our lives,” wrote the firm. “It becomes a manifesto suggesting that order, care, and conscious selection, principles intrinsic to museum storage, are themselves artistic practices, capable of enriching everyday existence.”
