Marking a highly symbolic return to the city where the brand was born, architecture and design studio X+Living has unveiled the MINISO LAND Guangzhou No. 1 Store within Guangzhou’s Grandview Mall, translating the company’s evolution into a monumental, dual-level narrative journey that merges classical symmetry with whimsical, three-dimensional pop scenography.
An unfolding pop-up facade on the bustling streetscape solves a highly restrictive 0.4-meter extension depth constraint. By demolishing the original street-facing canopy and opening up the enclosed double-layer exterior wall, the design team established a grand, highly layered entrance. To passersby, the storefront functions as an unfolding gift box where stylized flora, fauna, and recognizable IP characters leap forward. This dramatic threshold intentionally dialogues with the adjacent oceanarium and science museum, linking the experiential retail environment directly to the collective memories of the city’s residents.
Entering the Edenic assembly on the ground floor introduces visitors to a secular, peaceful landscape. The spatial framework leans heavily on classical Greek antiquities, establishing a sense of order through symmetrical colonnades, soaring arched portals, and rigorous mathematical proportions. This structured environment serves as a calm, grounding backdrop for the vibrant, colorful merchandise. Rather than pushing transactions, the immersive brand experience encourages slow, unstructured wandering, effectively dissolving the clinical, high-pressure atmosphere that often characterizes modern commercial space design.
The symbolism of the crimson core sits at the heart of this classical layout, where a massive, stylized red apple installation serves as both a spatial anchor and a contemporary narrative focal point. This element acts as a playful subversion of the traditional Edenic archetype, reinterpreting temptation as a celebration of curiosity, vitality, and creative exploration. Encircling this core, the customized shelving systems are integrated directly into the structural columns, ensuring that the transition from architectural appreciation to product browsing feels entirely seamless and unforced.
A sensory palette of textures begins to merge with the strict, white-toned geometry of the classical peristyle as visitors move deeper into the ground level. Wall-mounted shelving units adopt the tiered compositions of ancient shrines, interspersed with staggered, irregular niches that showcase small-scale products like precious artifacts. Underfoot, the careful modulation of light and shadow creates a soft, almost domestic warmth, transforming the act of shopping into a peaceful pilgrimage through a dreamlike landscape where creative interior design and color act as emotional catalysts.
Ascending into the symphonic factory on the second floor shifts the spatial narrative dramatically from natural serenity to the kinetic energy of human creation. Spanning an expansive 37-meter interior-facing facade, this level challenges visitors with a dynamic, industrial-inspired playground themed around an “Ode to Joy.” Here, the designer masterfully utilizes music as a structural metaphor to organize a complex array of diverse product categories, turning a potentially chaotic retail floor into a harmonious, rhythmic sequence of visual discoveries.
The industrial rhythm of play on this upper level reimagines the product displays as giant, whimsical machinery and musical instruments. Components resembling wind, string, and brass instruments are disassembled and reconstructed to form functional product shelving, while exposed metal rivets, mechanical arms, and raw-material storage crates infuse the space with a playful industrial aesthetic. The physical volumes of the displays appear compressed, angled, and folded by unseen acoustic forces, creating unexpected sightlines that frame glimpses of neighboring zones and encourage continuous, curious exploration.
A vivid refuge from the urban rush is established within Guangzhou’s fast-paced landscape, functioning as a gentle, surreal dream overflowing from the crevices of daily life. By utilizing lightweight visual languages and an unapologetically bold color palette, the interactive retail concept successfully extends the boundaries of physical shopping, offering a temporary haven where busy professionals and families can pause, play, and reconnect with a sense of wonder. Through this thoughtful, human-centric approach, the act of consumption is elevated into a shared emotional experience.
The evolution of fantastical retail landscapes represented by this project highlights a sophisticated maturation of the hyper-imaginative spaces that X+Living has pioneered globally. For readers tracking the studio’s spatial experiments, this flagship shares a clear genetic link to the whimsical, multi-story wonderland they crafted for the MINISO Land in Shanghai, yet it refines that energy with a more classical, structured spatial hierarchy. The studio’s unique ability to merge childlike wonder with high-concept environments is further reflected in their elaborate, toy-centric retail designs across Asia, as well as their capacity to translate this cinematic scale into luxury commercial environments, such as the deeply immersive, subterranean Deji Plaza Phase II Art Bazaar in Nanjing. By consistently treating commercial interiors not merely as points of sale, but as immersive, narrative worlds, X+Living continues to redefine how we experience and interact with physical spaces.