Situated in Chengdu’s Taikoo Li, the Lemaire boutique occupies a stretch that falls abruptly quiet—despite the tourist-thronged Apple Store and fountain plaza just steps away. It was precisely this quality of stillness amid commotion that drew the project to this site, and that became one of the design’s points of departure.
Where conventional retail design optimises for sales efficiency per square metre, this project chose instead to forfeit a portion of the interior, pulling the façade back to create a landscaped buffer between the animated street and the quiet room within. Two tiers of steps form this threshold: visitors first ascend to an entry platform, then descend into the shop—a rise-and-fall sequence that sharpens the sense of passage from outside to inside and lends the act of entering a quiet ceremony.
“Everydayness” was Lemaire’s explicit design brief. In urban domestic life, plants appear as potted things in the home rather than specimens planted in the ground, so the entry landscape uses movable pots instead of fixed planters. To root the gesture more firmly in Chengdu’s own vernacular, the pots are traditional soy-paste jars—saucing up the greenery, as it were.
Bamboo—a material native to Sichuan—runs through the project in both literal and allusive registers. Bamboo flooring and bamboo blinds make the material “visible,” while the exterior façade evokes a woven-bamboo wall “invisibly,” through slender stone profiles and ridged textures. This interplay of the tangible and the implied builds a coherent material narrative around bamboo. Intangible cultural heritage from Sichuan also finds its way in: the Charwa felt blankets of the Yi people of Liangshan and woven bamboo from local cizhú craft were developed in collaboration with heritage artisans into interior patterns aligned with the brand’s visual identity.
Detailing that speaks to place is equally central to the design. Alongside the local materials, the project makes extensive use of Moroccan Bejmat tiles—a staple of the brand’s interiors worldwide. Their texture closely resembles that of traditional Chinese grey brick, so here they are laid in classical Chinese paving patterns, forming a quiet echo of the bamboo weave and Charwa felt elsewhere in the room.
Equal attention is paid to where one material meets another. The skirting board, for instance, borrows from Du Fu’s Thatched Cottage the technique of pressing a timber strip down over brick at the wainscot line—transforming the skirting into a distinct material layer that unifies thresholds, steps, and other interior elements. Construction is also used to imply spatial elements: a concealed stile within the door frame is suggested by notches left on either side of the threshold, while the lintel above projects outward and extends into a timber rail for displaying garments.
