In Beijing’s Sanlitun district, Rotterdam-based architecture practice MVRDV gave the new flagship store for Chinese fashion retailer Urban Revivo a façade that changes color depending on the angle it’s viewed from, shifting from blue to purple through a dichroic coating applied to suspended aluminium tiles and tubes. The 4,120-square-meter Urban Revivo Sanlitun flagship store (44,350 square feet) occupies a prominent position on Sanlitun West Street, the pedestrian route linking the two shopping villages of Taikoo Li Sanlitun. The color-shifting façade becomes a literal expression of the brief: a store that reads differently depending on where you’re standing, chic and international from one angle, rooted in Beijing from another.
Founded in 2006, Urban Revivo has expanded to more than 380 stores worldwide, and this flagship sits at a deliberate hinge point in the neighborhood: Sanlitun West Street connects the young, trend-driven fashion of Taikoo Li’s South Village with the dramatic bespoke façades favored by the luxury brands clustered in the North Village.
A dichroic coating façade drives the entire street-facing identity of the project. In places, the array of tiles bulges outward into a wave-like three-dimensional form, adding shadow and highlight to the color shifts already built into the surface finish.
Seven circular portals, inspired by traditional Chinese moon gates, punctuate the façade as window displays, hinting at what waits inside before visitors reach the entrance. The largest, central gate leads directly into an interior finished in grey brick, a material reference to Beijing’s hutongs that sets a neutral stage for Urban Revivo’s collection.
Each floor carries its own identity, established through the shape of its portals and niches rather than through a change in plan. The ground floor’s traditional moon gates give way to arched openings on the first floor, rounded-corner rectangles on the second, and an inverted curve on the top floor — a sequence that grows progressively more contemporary as visitors climb.
Materials and color shift floor by floor in step with this progression. The first floor takes on a youthful, bold register with reflective surfaces and bright blue furniture; the second moves toward darker, more refined materials; the third is reserved for private shopping, finished in velvet cobalt-blue upholstery for a more intimate register.
Six Bold Rooms anchor this Bold Rooms retail design program, each occupying a different corner of the plan. A soft room lines its walls in upholstered cushions, a playful room is built from blocks of recycled fabric, an urban room relies on reflective walls and floors, and a daring room uses wooden boxes to stage merchandise.
An unexpected room completes the thematic set with fabric curtains that change according to the current collection or feature designs by local artists. Avant-garde rooms extend the same logic vertically, with glass display cases lining two atriums within the building and functioning as additional showcases threaded through the plan.
“The challenge of this project was to create a space that feels grounded in its surroundings while also reflecting the global aspirations of Urban Revivo,” said Jacob van Rijs, founding partner of MVRDV. “So we used local references, like Beijing’s roof tiles, but combined them with modern techniques to create spaces that evolve with the visitor’s experience, from the colour-changing façade to the smallest design details inside.”
MVRDV’s design brief extended down to the signage and clothing racks, following the same logic the studio applied a short walk away at the Tiffany & Co. flagship in Sanlitun’s North Village, where a similarly bespoke façade responds to its own luxury retail context.
The more contestable claim in this project is that a single dichroic façade can genuinely hold together two audiences as different as Taikoo Li’s trend-driven South Village crowd and the luxury shoppers drawn to the dramatic bespoke exteriors further north — a bet that depends entirely on which angle, and which floor, a visitor happens to encounter first.
Urban Revivo Sanlitun Flagship Store by MVRDV | Location: Sanlitun West Street, Beijing, China — Year: 2025–2026 — Key materials: aluminium tiles and tubes with dichroic coating, grey brick, velvet cobalt-blue upholstery