Client: CHOW TAI FOOK JEWELLERY GROUP

Overview

The design concept of this jewelry store in Beijing includes not only the characteristics of both ancient and modern designs, but also the characteristics of landmarks in the city, thus making this store unique and standing out from its counterparts.

Beijing is a richly historical city as it was the capital of many dynasties in Chinese history, so it is difficult to simply use one thing or a simple pattern to summarize the characteristics of the entire city. After thinking hard, we finally chose the classical royal gardens as the theme of this design – Beihai Park and the Imperial Gardens of the Forbidden City to represent this city. We also applied modern painting techniques to outline and present Beihai Park and the Imperial Garden of the Forbidden City and refined their respective characteristics into the entire painting.

Goals

We framed the painting onto the “safe deposit box” element of the "Heritage" theme store: by printing the painting of Beihai Garden and Imperial Garden on fabric, and divide it into countless smaller parts as the doors of the safe deposit boxes, then randomly combining the patterns and colors together, colourful patterns of the Beihai Park and the Imperial Garden of the Forbidden City are organically arranged on the walls of the shop, making the design interesting and unconventional. The whole process looks deceptively simple but in fact, took our designers incredibly substantial amount of time and effort, from the selection of fabrics and colours, to reviewing mock-ups and finalizing the ultimate rendition on the walls covered by the different pieces of the puzzle. Furthermore, we also introduced playful numerical features on the wall by assigning each safe box a unique number at the lower right corner of the printed fabrics on the wall, each representing a date or a homophony of love etc., for example, number "520" is the homophone of "I love you" in Mandarin.

Process

We also re-calibrated the carousel jewelry display bar table at the centre of the shop. Surrounded by pink display tables and green chair to pop out from the painting patterns on the theme wall. We also employed a stripe pattern at the base of the it to make it stand out from the many other display stands in the shop. Greenish marble stone was chosen as the table top and hung lamps over the bar table specially made in the shape of tiles commonly used on roofs of ancient buildings. The shop uses pink and green as the main colors and the latter was taken as it represents plants in both the Beihai Park and the Imperial Garden. The combination of these two colors brews a dreamy vibe, and the contrast of the two colors is sharp enough to enable visitors and customers easily spot the cultural landmark symbols on the cloth paintings on the walls, and finding the subtly close connection between the store and the city of Beijing;