Excerpt: TU, 1000 Trees by Tens Atelier is an interior design project that transforms indoor spaces into outdoor public spaces, reinterpreting TU’s inclusive brand concept. The design features a large outdoor step, sunken plaza, and corner coffee shop, creating an outdoor experience where customers can enjoy coffee and leisurely communication while walking around the city streets.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] TU, an original boutique women’s wear brand, was established in Shanghai in 2015. TU expresses the independent, autonomous and elegant spirit of modern women with its unique design, neat tailoring and sophisticated workmanship.
For this TU’s new store, the designers hope that the space design can also inherit the concept of 1000 Trees: green, natural, affinity and open. Therefore, they decided to treat the overall indoor space as an outdoor public space, create a sense of walking around the city streets, facing consumers with a more open attitude, reinterpreting TU’s inclusive brand concept, and welcome every customer passing by to stop.
The designers introduced three common elements in public space: a large outdoor step, sunken plaza, and corner coffee shop. Through the combination of these three elements, an experience of being in the shade of the street and drinking coffee and communicating leisurely is created.
Huge entrance stairs: In order to dispel the doubts of customers, they designed steps at the entrance of the store, with the design of the steps, the interior space of the store is open to the inner “street” of 1000 Trees, bring people from “outdoor” to “indoor”, blur the boundaries and shuttle freely.
Corner coffee shop: The client hopes to have a coffee space that can be sold and also can serve the VIP members, in the future it may become an independent coffee brand. After the designers’ repeated consideration, “how to integrate the coffee area into the entire space, forming a relatively independent state with the clothing sales area, but coexisting with each other” has become one of the problems they need to focus on.
Therefore, they specially put two seats on the stairs at the entrance, which is inspired by the various streetside coffee shops in Shanghai. They hope this small corner can provide a short-term rest place for the coming and going consumers, and it can also create a gray space with the stairs at the entrance to transition from “outdoor” to “indoor” place.
Sunken plaza: For the rest area of the sunken space, the designers have specially chosen a high-saturated orange color to match the huge green ceiling above, hoping this area will become the visual center of the entire space, meanwhile they also hope that people in the sunken plaza will have some feeling of being outdoors under big tree.
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