Project Name: Snow Peak MATRO Department Store

Location: Suzhou, China

Design Team: KiKi ARCHi

Total Floor Area: 628 m²

Completion: 2025

Photography: Ruijing Photo Beijing

Feature: KiKi ARCHi's "Snow Peak MATRO Department Store" demonstrates how innovative "elevation shift" spatial sculpting strategies and masterful indoor-outdoor continuity design philosophy fusion techniques can transform a retail space within a commercial complex into a culturally profound sanctuary of exploration and brand experience.

This 628-square-meter store dramatically occupies the ground floor of a luxury mall in Suzhou's historic city center, presenting itself as a profound meditation on contemporary retail space design, natural materials, and outdoor lifestyle integration. Through carefully considered spatial organization and material selection, it creates a shopping experience that seamlessly weaves functionality with poetic sensibility.

The project's most compelling design feature lies in its fundamental reimagining of traditional retail display systems. The concrete-sculpted artificial "hill" serves not only as a display platform but becomes the core of spatial organization, ensuring customers experience unique "urban hiking" sensations within the undulating terrain. This spatial strategy creates continuous dialogue between architecture and natural topography, achieving a visual geological cross-section effect.

KiKi ARCHi's design language fluently expresses contemporary Japanese minimalist architectural aesthetics, employing modern applications of natural materials such as wood and concrete to redefine retail experiences. The staggered timber post system is innovatively used to unify visual language while cleverly serving multiple roles as display platforms, seating, and structural supports. This bold integration strategy not only adds visual coherence to spaces but cleverly accommodates the complex functional demands of modern retail operations.

Most remarkably, the architects create emotional transitions between different functional zones through clever manipulation of dual spatial narratives of "surface" and "interior." The "surface" layer provides an open shopping experience realm for browsing products and social interaction; the "interior" layer creates an inward-looking landscape space adorned with gravel and lighting to form an underground landscape. These two layers complement each other, appearing from specific angles like a geological cross-section, creating an atmosphere where time and space intersect.

Display strategy continues this harmonious coexistence design philosophy between architecture and nature. The "scattered + non-fixed" display system facilitates rapid merchandise changes, while the timber post array reinforces the integration between the store and forest camping scenes. The integration of a café corner promotes social interaction and brand experience, ensuring a comfortable and pleasant shopping environment—perfectly suited for outdoor equipment display and brand culture communication.

Design Team - KiKi ARCHi stands as a distinguished representative of new-generation Japanese architectural practice, founded in Tokyo in 2013 by Yoshihiko Seki and Saika Akiyoshi, having established a pioneering reputation in contemporary commercial space design and cross-cultural architectural language innovation since its founding. This Tokyo-based practice with operations extending to China redefines contemporary Japanese architects' role in international design discourse through coordinated integration of design and culture.

KiKi ARCHi brings exceptional multicultural design perspectives and deep understanding of interdisciplinary approaches to architectural practice. The practice has garnered recognition for its commitment to integrating traditional Japanese architectural wisdom with contemporary international modernism, with Yoshihiko Seki being a distinguished graduate of Shibaura Institute of Technology, having trained at renowned practices including Studio Bednarski in London and Kengo Kuma & Associates, while Saika Akiyoshi, also a Shibaura Institute of Technology graduate, previously worked at HIDETO HORIIKE+URTOPIA and Office Hiyoshizaka.

The firm's design philosophy emphasizes that architecture should transcend functional limitations—designed not merely to satisfy basic needs but to evolve organically with users' lifestyles and cultural backgrounds. Through deep attention to "KiKi" (the sense to judge aesthetic value in various fields), working across diversified projects from architecture to interior, landscape, industrial, and furniture design, they believe the best design results from refined expression through precise and thoughtful processes. KiKi ARCHi believes design should serve as a carrier of brand identity and spatial memory, creating unique experiential environments through strategic spatial organization and material selection.

Beyond practice, the firm maintains strong academic integration through Yoshihiko Seki's lecturer positions at Toyo University Graduate School and Julong International Art School in Quanzhou, China. Through thoughtful integration of natural materials with modern construction methods, Japanese and international design elements application, and time-tested architectural wisdom, KiKi ARCHi has established itself as a significant contributor to contemporary Asian architectural discourse, creating architectural works that are both locally responsive and embrace global design vision. The firm currently maintains a professional architectural team including Saika Akiyoshi, Takahito Yagyuda, and Tianping Wang, occupying a unique position within the dynamic architectural landscapes of Tokyo, Beijing, and Shanghai.