Xiaodu Premium Experience Store

The new flagship experience store for the high-fashion brand Xiao Zhe, at 758 Julu Road in Shanghai, is designed by Zhou Dejing with team members Huang Yingzi, Wang Shengqi, Zhuang Shaokai and Zheng Yu, lighting by Libenshe, structural engineering by Tao Xinwei and construction by Shanghai Guqin. Opened in a post-pandemic context, the shop occupies a busy street and blends retail, public and leisure qualities, leaning into community participation. The renovation retains parts of the original structure, recomposing them as the logical pivots of the new design. The team began from Bernard Tschumi's idea of the event space, searching for an ambiguous, indeterminate condition that encourages behaviour between shop and street, and then deliberately set the architecture aside, reading the brand and its garments to find elements that could give the building a clear form. The result is a direct, detail-rich offline space that combines formal beauty, eventfulness and brand recognition. The portico-like frontage acts as an intermediary between shop and block, allowing heterogeneous elements and events to meet. The waiting and display zones are set in deliberate contrast, stone against cloth, light grey against off-white, hard lines against soft curves, regular proportions against a winding route, so that the front-of-house acts as a transition that changes how visitors feel, touch and move. Drawing on the tradition of the super-articulated Thomasson, the renovation does not strip out old elements but repaints or re-materials them so that they become more conspicuous, treating the building as a palimpsest in which traces of earlier time are kept, photographed and shared.