- Area: 300 m²
- Year: 2017
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Photographs:Chasing Wang
Text description provided by the architects. When we first came to the western-style house located in Shanghai French Concession, the proprietor described to us how an unmarried young girl rebelled, went through metamorphosis and finally found her true love.
Hence, we thought of The Secret Garden in which Mary broke into the forbidden garden and there Mary and Collin found the key to happiness, and experienced a poetic resurrection with the garden.
Therefore, we prepared a “secret garden” for young girls to make the wedding gown shop become the place where young girls’ dreams are hidden.
In order to create the conception of unexpectedly entering a time and space, we use materials to invert the interior and exterior spaces. We use glass bricks on the external walls and leave the internal walls exposed with original bricks. Only white gradient glass is added as separation.
The light sprays along the gradient white from the ceiling to build a kind of ethereal realm amid fog. The only bright color in the space is a colorful stone arc-shaped door which is like the door in the ruins leading to the other time and space and ushering in unprecedented spaces one by one.
The fitting room is the key to happiness like in the story. We use white curtain to discard all disturbances and let young girls in a magic-mirror-like space surrounded by mirrors on three sides, thus completing a poetic resurrection.
For us, we have been trying to find a harmonious coexistence between two extreme elements of being artistic and being commercialized. We are just expressing contradictions and harmony in a relatively mild way.
