Tag Archives: showroom

Doreme Lets The Fashion’s Backstage Materials Take Centre Stage

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At first glance, Doreme does not immediately announce what it is inspired by. There is no oversized spool of thread or literal sewing machine turned into décor. Instead, the clues reveal themselves gradually: neon lacing along a workstation, buttons used as furniture hardware, fabric gathered overhead, and zippers, yarns and drawstrings displayed inside transparent tables. What begins as a colorful contemporary workplace slowly unfolds into an imaginative spatial interpretation of garment-making.

Designed by Kolkata-based architecture and design practice Spaces and Design, helmed by Pooja Bihani, the 3,600-square-foot workspace and showroom transforms a former warehouse into something resembling a high-fashion sewing kit brought to life.

Designer: Spaces and Design

Rather than dividing the warehouse into a conventional sequence of cabins and corridors, the designers preserve much of its openness. Working, displaying, discussing and reviewing collections happen within the same visual field, creating one continuously evolving environment.

Curved and oval workstations soften the rigidity of the warehouse shell, while a nearly twenty-foot-long shared table anchors the centre. Employees can see fabrics being handled, collections reviewed and teams working from across the floor, making the company’s everyday activity part of the spatial experience itself.

This sense of continuity extends into circulation. Few solid partitions interrupt the plan; spaces flow naturally into one another, with textiles often taking on the role traditionally given to walls.

Fabric is used almost architecturally throughout the project. The most dramatic example floats overhead, where folds of lime-green fabric radiate from a central stretch ceiling to form a theatrical sunburst canopy. Light filters through the gathered surface, allowing it to operate somewhere between ceiling, sculpture and spatial marker.

Its exuberance is balanced by a restrained base of whites and muted greys, punctuated by saturated greens, pinks, yellows and oranges. The palette feels playful without competing with the garments, samples and materials already inhabiting the space.

Where separation is required, layered curtain panels replace conventional walls. These translucent textile interventions allow light and glimpses of activity to pass through while gently guiding circulation. Several are manually laced and assembled, giving them the tactile irregularity of something made by hand.

Look closer, and references to garment-making become even more charming. Storage surfaces feature perforations reminiscent of cross-stitch, conventional handles are replaced by exaggerated buttons, and desk partitions are framed with neon strings. Rather than replicating tailoring equipment literally, the design borrows gestures of stitching, threading, fastening and assembling.

Some of the most delightful details come from materials that would normally remain backstage. Transparent furniture bases hold color-sorted buttons, zippers, yarns and drawstrings sourced from the production process. Items typically hidden away in drawers become part of the workspace’s visual identity, allowing the raw vocabulary behind the finished garment to take centre stage.

Even smaller elements continue the story. Hangers incorporate punctured stress balls, while pantry crockery follows the established color palette, showing how consistently the visual language has been carried through the project.

Flexibility is equally important. Freestanding green gondolas allow displays to shift as collections evolve, while stepped units double as merchandise platforms and informal seating. This adaptability suits Doreme’s hybrid identity: it is neither simply an office nor simply a showroom.

Instead of hiding the working process behind polished retail theatre, the project allows production, reviewing, organizing and displaying to overlap. The people making decisions about garments occupy the same spatial narrative as the products themselves.

Together, these details translate the everyday vocabulary of garment-making into architecture. Spaces and Design has created a workplace that celebrates not only the finished garment, but also the threads, fastenings, experimentation, assembly and human activity behind it. Doreme becomes less a showroom decorated around fashion and more a living environment built from the very processes that make fashion possible.

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Louis Vuitton’s Beijing Flagship Turns Retail Into a Vertical, Immersive Journey

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Retail and hospitality design is one of those rare territories where architecture gets to perform on multiple levels at once. It is not just about function or spectacle, but about storytelling, how materials, light, circulation, and atmosphere come together to momentarily detach visitors from the outside world and immerse them in a carefully choreographed experience. The newly opened Maison Louis Vuitton Sanlitun in Beijing is a compelling example of this ambition realized at an urban scale.

Designed by Jun Aoki for Louis Vuitton, the flagship is located in Beijing’s energetic Sanlitun district. The building brings together retail, hospitality, and exhibition spaces within a single vertically organized envelope, offering an experience that unfolds floor by floor rather than spreading outward. In doing so, it rethinks what a luxury flagship can be in one of the city’s most intense commercial neighborhoods.

Designer: Jun Aoki & Associates

The project continues Jun Aoki’s long-standing collaboration with the House, following earlier Louis Vuitton buildings in Tokyo and Osaka. In Beijing, however, his approach feels particularly attuned to context. Rather than competing with Sanlitun’s visual noise, the building introduces a sense of material depth and calibrated transparency. The architecture does not shout; it subtly absorbs and refracts the city around it.

The most striking element is the facade. Drawing inspiration from Taihu stones, scholars’ rocks historically associated with classical Chinese gardens, Aoki translates their eroded, organic character into an outer skin of hand-curved glass panels. Each panel is individually shaped, creating irregular contours and a layered surface that reads differently as daylight shifts. The glass possesses translucent and dichroic qualities, producing chromatic changes that respond to sun angle, weather, and movement. From close range, the facade feels tactile and sculptural; from across the block, reflections stretch and compress, giving the building a constantly changing presence.

Behind this expressive outer layer sits a secondary envelope that handles thermal performance and weather protection. This dual-skin strategy allows the facade to operate simultaneously as cultural reference, environmental filter, and urban interface, an architectural device that balances symbolism with performance.

Inside, visitors enter directly into a central atrium that rises through three levels and organizes the Women’s collections. Daylight filters through the glass facade into this vertical void, animating floors, balustrades, and circulation cores. Retail programs are distributed across four levels, housing Women’s and Men’s Leather Goods, Ready-To-Wear, Shoes, Jewelry, Accessories, Perfumes, and Beauty. Movement remains clear and legible, with escalators and stairs positioned to preserve long sightlines through the atrium and back toward the city. More private client lounges are tucked into quieter zones, defined through subtle shifts in material and lighting rather than overt separation.

A distinct tonal shift occurs on the third floor, where the Louis Vuitton Home collection is presented. Furniture, textiles, and tableware by designers such as Patricia Urquiola and Cristian Mohaded are displayed in rooms scaled closer to domestic interiors, with softer finishes and calmer light, allowing the objects to breathe.

At the top, Le Café Louis Vuitton crowns the building, the brand’s first café in Beijing. Arrival begins with a mirrored vestibule that multiplies reflections before opening into a flowing dining space. The bar references the proportions and layered construction of Louis Vuitton trunks, while a terrace runs along the facade, partially screened by the glass skin and offering views across Sanlitun and the surrounding city.

By combining retail and hospitality within a single architectural envelope, Maison Louis Vuitton Sanlitun demonstrates how experiential design can transcend shopping alone. Through material storytelling, spatial sequencing, and a sensitive response to context, the building creates an immersive world, one that briefly pulls visitors away from Beijing’s relentless pace and invites them into a more deliberate, crafted experience.

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