Location: Beijing, China

Architect: MVRDV

Area: 4,120 m²

Year: 2026

Client: Urban Revivo

Founding Partner in Charge: Jacob van Rijs

Director: Aser Giménez Ortega

Photography: Wen Studio, Urban Revivo

Design Features: The Urban Revivo Sanlitun Flagship Store occupies 4,120 m² on Sanlitun West Street, along the principal pedestrian route between Taikoo Li's South and North Villages. One end of this route carries a younger, more accessible retail culture; the other is marked by luxury brands and bespoke facades. Rather than compressing the four-storey shop into a single emblem, MVRDV sets up two speeds of reading: the exterior changes with movement and daylight, while portals, materials and colour recast the interior as visitors climb.

The facade is assembled from suspended aluminium tiles and tubes, finished in Urban Revivo's signature blue and coated with a dichroic surface that shifts between blue and purple. In places the array swells into three-dimensional waves, preventing shadow, highlight and colour from settling into one fixed image. Seven circular openings, derived from the traditional Chinese moon gate, operate as display windows and points of approach. The largest opening establishes the main entrance.

Inside, grey brick provides a continuous backdrop that refers to Beijing's hutongs while remaining neutral enough for clothing and installations. Yet the four floors are organised less by material than by the gradual transformation of their portals. The complete circles of the ground floor give way to rounded rectangles above and finally to abstract inverted curves at the top. The ascent becomes a timeline from a recognisable historical form towards contemporary geometry, rather than a repetition of the same retail template.

This formal progression is accompanied by changing atmospheres. Reflective surfaces and bright blue furniture give the ground floor a more open and energetic character. The second level moves towards darker, more restrained materials, while private shopping areas above introduce velvet, cobalt upholstery and a more enclosed scale. Mirrored ceilings, grey-brick portals, metal elements and blue carpet are recombined along the route, allowing each level to register through experience rather than merchandise alone.

Six Bold Rooms interrupt the regular displays with smaller, more sharply defined settings. The soft room uses upholstered wall cushions; the playful room is formed from recycled fabric blocks; the urban room multiplies reflections across walls and floor; the daring room displays products in timber boxes; the unexpected room is enclosed by fabric curtains that can change with a collection or feature work by local artists; and the avant-garde rooms line two atriums with glass cases. Like editorial breaks in a long text, they repeatedly reset the pace of the four-storey journey.

MVRDV extends the design to signage, clothing racks and display elements so that facade, portals, merchandising and brand identity operate as one system. The project is therefore more than a visual translation of roof tiles and moon gates. It dismantles familiar references and rebuilds them as a spatial grammar that changes with movement, level and collection: architecture first catches the city’s attention, then turns looking into an unfolding retail experience.

Design Team: MVRDV was founded in 1993 by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries. Headquartered in Rotterdam, the practice also works from Shanghai, Paris, Berlin and New York. The three founders, all graduates of Delft University of Technology, now lead a team of more than 300 alongside partners Frans de Witte, Fokke Moerel, Wenchian Shi and Bertrand Schippan.

Research and collaboration are central to the studio's method. Clients, users, technical experts and consultants from different fields are brought into the process early, across work that ranges from architecture and interiors to urbanism, landscape, exhibitions and publishing. An in-house Climate Team and the computational group MVRDV NEXT connect design ideas with sustainability, technical delivery and long-term adaptability.

MVRDV's best-known projects include Rotterdam's Markthal and Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, Tianjin Binhai Library, Valley in Amsterdam and the Shenzhen Women and Children's Centre. The Urban Revivo Sanlitun Flagship Store was led by founding partner Jacob van Rijs with interior design director Aser Giménez Ortega. Its team worked across competition, schematic, definitive-design and site-supervision phases, condensing the studio's urban-scale storytelling into a four-storey retail building.