Subliminal Retail

Zhang Yiyuan is a 120-year-old Beijing tea house with a strong heritage position but limited traction with younger consumers. The project proposes Motong, a cross-border personal care brand that combines oriental plant extracts with modern eye health — and a retail environment that makes the proposition spatial.

The site is a shopping-centre atrium with a high footfall and a mixed audience: office workers, families and students. The brand needs to read as premium without becoming remote.

How can a heritage brand become contemporary without losing its material memory?

The plan is a central island under a spherical dome and honeycomb frame. Tea-leaf cells become a hexagon grid; the organic growth of the plant becomes the curvature of the dome. Wood and transparent membranes keep the space light. Four product colours — Longhao Brown, Golden Robe, Jade Bud Green and Chu Mo Black — are staged as four micro-landscapes around the island.

The dome is both architecture and display: a single, legible organism rather than a sequence of walls. The visitor walks around the island, seeing the products from different angles, the way one might turn a tea leaf in the hand.

The result is a retail interior that behaves like a brand model. It gives the sub-brand a form that can be recognised before it is read, and a spatial language that can travel across formats.