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Park-style, social venues, youthful energy... Unveiling the secrets of "non-standard" design thinking

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2025-01-14

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Editor-in-Chief | Yang Ming

Editor | Liu Kaiye

Source | Paiwo Business Design Research Institute

Park-style, social spaces, youthful energy…Behind the updates in popular commercial buzzwords are the shifts in consumer groups and consumption concepts, as well as repeated "scene upgrades."

With city-level and even regional shopping malls reaching saturation, the emergence of new commercial formats continuously expands the possibilities of commercial scenarios, and "non-standard" scene design ideas are highly sought after.

"Scene thinking" allows commerce to break away from design approaches that start with "objects," shifting to truly prioritizing "people" as the design's core principle. Park-style, social spaces, youthful energy…Behind the updates in popular commercial buzzwords are the shifts in consumer groups and consumption concepts, as well as repeated "scene upgrades."

In this issue, we examine some new/upcoming projects to explore current trends in commercial spaces and how to draw inspiration from seemingly "unconventional" non-standard projects.

New Social Scenes Catering to Lifestyles

Case Study: Luofang Center

In a time when material needs are easily met, emotional needs become particularly urgent. Contemporary young people are more willing to pay for their interests and lifestyles, and are more enthusiastic about pursuing social connections with "aligned values."

Luofang Center, as a community supporting facility in Chengdu's Luhu Ecological City, embodies the characteristics of a successful commercial development. Its 50,000 square meter A/B buildings, positioned as a "regional social life center," cater to diverse consumer needs through scene design and business layout, encompassing art and culture, ecological experiences, outdoor activities, parent-child growth, and pet-friendly amenities.

Through meticulous garden-style landscaping, the project creates an immersive "forest-like atmosphere." The street scale is spacious, yet filled with visual elements such as stairs, small fountains, wooden houses, and trees, creating a relaxed and comfortable atmosphere for strolling.

As a community-oriented commercial space, it naturally considers family groups. A sloped, circular plaza is created in the center of Building A using stepped elevation changes, featuring a landmark children's play area—the Xiaojudan themed exploration space.

The Xiaojudan Plaza also houses the first national S-level flagship store of Xinshan Bookstore, a city-integrated cultural space combining reading, art, exhibitions, and dining, catering to the deeper social needs of elite customer groups.

◎Xinshan Bookstore Luhu Store (design drawing) | As the spatial layout's framework, the flow lines of Xinshan Bookstore Luhu Store create a sense of ups and downs and twists and turns. The sunken first floor incorporates coffee, drinks, and dining scenes. Via a hidden staircase, one reaches the second floor's book-lined reading area, transitioning to a quiet reading mode. The everyday hustle and bustle cleverly transforms into a near and far white noise during reading, bringing a touch of everyday life into the world of books. (Source: Lu Ke)

The creation of the "Petal" public art installation serves as a pleasant resting place and children's playground, complementing the overhead "Crown of Light." It combines aesthetic value and practicality, along with the water features in front, creating a relaxing strolling area that also draws people to nearby restaurants and shops.

The SPACE LAB space capsule-shaped boxes serve as spaces for art exhibitions and other events, while the underground level functions as a performance theater, with surrounding steps acting as seating. The scene and operation complement each other to meet the entertainment and social needs of today's young people.

◎Art activities inside the space capsule, "Night of Nature" Berlin Film Festival

Located at the northernmost end of Luofang Center Building B, the 13,000 square meter Xueqiu (Snow Hill) Park is a comprehensive outdoor park with a central lawn, a meandering stream, a skate bowl, and ice and snow landscapes. The professional skate bowl, designed by the team behind the Tokyo Olympics venue, provides a public space for skateboarding enthusiasts; the 6-meter-tall, super-cute inflatable "Hugging Puppy" installation, combined with the pet lifestyle brand "HELLO PET" and "Starbucks pet-friendly stores," forms a pet-friendly ecosystem.

Luofang Center uses people's daily needs as its foundation, and its scene construction truly achieves symbiosis with "people." We often talk about meeting the needs of different customer groups, but can we truly identify these needs? Luofang Center uses "lifestyle" to differentiate groups and create different themed scenes, a practice worth emulating.

Market-Style Commercial Spaces Create Urban Vibrancy

Case Study: Pro Market, Hongshoufang

Located in Zhengzhou's Pro Ideal Country, Pro Market aims to create the "domestic market ceiling." This new alley-style market combines fresh food markets, lifestyle retail, trendy dining, and entertainment and leisure functions. It serves both the residents of Pro Ideal Country, providing convenience and meeting their daily needs for gatherings and dining out, and also attracts tourists from surrounding cities, becoming a high-energy creative landmark.

Covering 4200 square meters, the building consists of three relatively independent blocks. The main structure is made of wooden beams and steel columns, using a large amount of spruce wood. This emphasizes environmental protection while creating a simple and comfortable design. Combined with a central park filled with greenery, open terraces, and large areas of translucent glass, it creates a strong natural and warm atmosphere.

The axes dividing the blocks become the main flow lines connecting the residential area and the park on both sides, and also serve as important traffic routes connecting various functional areas. In the external street-facing sections, outdoor seating is arranged using the building's gray space, combining indoor and outdoor streets to create a vibrant commercial atmosphere and consumption scene.

◎Indoor and outdoor street combination design, Image source: Cunzai Architecture

The two-story market provides convenience for purchasing a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, and fresh seafood, while attempting to recreate the lively and human-centric memories within the space.

Prosperity Market is built around food culture, divided into four buildings: A, B, C, and D. Building A is a fusion fresh food restaurant focusing on Hangzhou cuisine; Building C is a sesame rice restaurant. Building B houses the CHIRORO butcher shop, CHAIKU tea shop, FUFUTOFU tofu shop, Xiefuchang local specialty retail store, and Qingsong Bailu. It offers not only "markets and stalls" but also "art and aesthetics," continuously unlocking a multi-dimensional ideal lifestyle.

Shanghai Rui'an Hongshufang, with the new commercial concept "Be Market," creates a bustling old community lane commercial district.

"Be Market" will be a fusion of four parts, creating a unique commercial label for Hongshufang: retail brands with Market DNA; catering brands that co-create new Market concept stores; FOODIE SOCIAL vegetable market; and original designs and niche treasure brands jointly creating weekend theme markets.

◎FOODIE SOCIAL Vegetable Market Rendering

The street-side commercial planning of the project adopts a "daytime cafe, nighttime bar" format, introducing boutique coffee shops, niche hotel brands, and other formats that appeal to young people, deeply integrating the lane alleys with commercial operations to create a 24-hour vibrant city.

The market approach uses the original commercial form of "stalls" to shorten the emotional distance between merchants and consumers, while the more flexible product display method creates more possibilities for business combinations. The design of buildings and spaces is the "hardware" for the scene to be established; the lively atmosphere requires interaction between people to complete.

Attraction of natural aesthetics for urban micro-vacations

Case Study: Panlong Tiandi

The green ecological trend is sweeping shopping malls, and the topic of park-style commercial projects is constantly discussed, with Chengdu Regular Yuanye and Shanghai Suhewan Vanke Tiandi becoming must-see projects for commercial professionals.

Shanghai Panlong Tiandi, positioned as "Urban retreat," has been extremely popular since its opening. Its greatest features are its cultural genes from ancient town renovation and natural ecological resources (3 kilometers of native Jiangnan waterways + over 230,000 square meters of parkland), with only over 50,000 square meters planned for commercial use.

Independent brand stores blend with the scene, such as Blue Bottle Coffee located in a century-old house at the intersection of Panlong Tiandi, also occupying a waterfront glass house and a semi-open-air rest pavilion. Integrating the boutique coffee culture from California into a wooden courtyard, the main house retains the unique "chuandou tailiang" wooden structure of the old house. The old ebony wood is paired with a modern stainless steel bar and equipment, creating a dialogue between modern and traditional.

◎Image Source: ZHUDI@SHADOOPLAY

For example, bobolee cake&brunch, founded by cake artist bobolee, once gained numerous fans for its "bourgeois terrace." Each store has a unique design. Located by the waterfront street in Panlong Tiandi, it echoes the project's vacation atmosphere with a green and natural garden style.

The ratio of ecological resources to commercial space in Panlong Tiandi pushes the public attributes of commerce to the extreme. The project's popularity proves the strong appeal of natural aesthetics to urban populations. Even with the tourism market now open, "urban micro-vacations" remain in high demand, especially in suburban areas or those near large cities, which are particularly suitable for this type of commercial ecology.

"Urban retreat" reflects a spirit of escape and longing. In the tide of the times, people need a "utopian" existence, which is why the Anaya model remains popular.

Art and cultural spaces, curators reshaping the commercial ecosystem

Case Study: Shunde ALSO

With content as its core, integrating office, living, commercial, and art, breaking the traditional image of a park, Hangzhou Tianmu Li explores and practices a new model of high-quality urban commercial and art complex for corporate headquarters. Art and cultural spaces have become a new form of commerce.

Shunde ALSO, jointly operated by the Tianmu Li team and Midea Group, is a comprehensive cultural commercial complex built around a "content co-creation community," positioned as an "art and cultural destination." The 37,000-square-meter building complex is located in the "one-hour living circle" at the junction of Guangzhou and Foshan, adjacent to the He Art Museum designed by Tadao Ando and the Midea Group global headquarters.

◎Midea Headquarters

◎Art Museum

The U-shaped block formed by the building complex has commercial space on the bottom two floors. The staggered heights of the buildings and the open spatial layout, with aluminum curtain walls and transparent glass on the exterior, continue the Tianmu Li style in the center of the block, creating three areas: a tree-lined square, a lawn square, and a sunken square. Different areas are combined with matching art and culture, transforming business facilities into cultural tourism classics and becoming a powerful tool for attracting city tourism.

In this open block, ALSO has introduced more than 30 brands representing the lifestyle of curators, including the cultural utopia Danxiang Space, the live music venue ALSO LIVE, the film industry innovator Sanke Yinghua, JNBYHOME, and 13 other South China debut stores, allowing spirit, art, culture, social interaction, and commerce to occur simultaneously. On the day of the project's opening, the curator community was officially established.

Today, curator brands have become part of shaping commercial scenes and are increasingly becoming a necessary means of differentiating commercial formats and operations. Through the support and co-creation of planners and curators, it helps to establish and operate excellent content/brands; using the industry as a link, the curator community grows horizontally, promoting the local incubation and growth of new project formats. In the commercial ecosystem reshaped by curators, more diverse urban public spaces may be born.

New commercial trends driven by youth culture

Case Study: Wangfujing Joy Plaza, THE BOX Chaowai

Youth trend culture is also influencing the direction of commercial development. With the increasing participation of young commercial professionals, commercial projects are developing a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of youth culture, with niche cultures and local cultures increasingly entering the field of vision, defining new commercial trends. From TX Huaihai and COSMO Chengdu to Bailian ZX Chuangqu Plaza, they have all found their differentiated paths in the segmented market by understanding the culture and consumption preferences of young people.

Beijing Wangfujing Joy Plaza is positioned as the first "new national tide" shopping mall in China. From the project's early publicity, we can see that Wangfujing Joy Plaza fully implements the concept of "new national tide," aiming to create a shopping mall without a template. It fits the context of the new generation, using "art + culture + technology" as a medium to create high-value, youthful scenes.

◎Wangfujing Joy Plaza, THE BOX Chaowai

Similarly in Beijing, THE BOX Chaowai, the second "youth power center" operated by Yingzhan, is an upgraded renovation of the original Beijing Kun Tai Shopping Mall. The renovated project continues the consumption scenarios of TX Huaihai, using a curatorial retail model and minimalist industrial design style to accurately target urban trendy youth, thereby revitalizing existing properties.

De-commercialization, from scene creation to "all-scenario"

In the era of existing stock, there are more and more characteristic businesses, and old shopping malls are constantly refreshing their scenes to adapt to the preferences of current consumers. In the past, single-theme scene creation has lost its competitiveness in commercially developed areas. People have become desensitized to commercial scene marketing, which is why the concept of "de-commercialization" has been proposed.

The creation of an "all-scenario" experience aims to blur the boundaries between commercial and public spaces, making consumption behavior more invisible. This places higher demands on the creativity and imagination of operators and greater reliance on early planning and design. Blind imitation and benchmarking are not feasible; creating unique features based on the actual situation of the location often requires greater investment.

However, for general commercial projects, there are only two paths: either rely on scarcity, where anything will sell; or seek differentiation, or excel in one aspect, because mediocrity leads to failure in fierce market competition.

Recommended Important Cultural and Tourism Events

The China Tourism Association will hold the 2025 China Tourism, Leisure and Entertainment Industry Annual Conference in Beijing from March 18-20 The conference will feature 10+ special forums on safety, theme parks, urban parks, immersive experiences, cultural tourism and commerce, tourist attractions, parent-child cultural tourism, resource revitalization, cultural tourism planning, new cultural tourism species, and cultural sports tourism (non-powered), etc. The conference will be held concurrently (March 19-21) with the 2025 China (Beijing) International Amusement Facilities and Equipment Expo (Beijing International Tourism, Leisure and Entertainment Industry Expo), with 600+ cultural tourism equipment and creative companies exhibiting, helping you upgrade your cultural tourism projects with new scenes and experiences in one stop. Click the poster to view details, scan the QR code to register for the forum and exhibition for free.

▲Scan the QR code to register for the forum and exhibition for free

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