Harry Winston’s Shanghai Boutique

Citation :

The vibrant city of Shanghai has no shortage of 21st-century architectural landmarks, with stellar works by Norman Foster, Michael Graves, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Paul Andreu, and other boldface talents. One of the most delightful additions to the cityscape, however, isn’t a big-gesture building but a two-story gem recently opened amid the glittering skyscrapers in the chic Xintiandi shopping district. Make that a jewel box, since we’re talking about Harry Winston’s new Shanghai flagship.

It’s the esteemed jewelry firm’s third boutique in China, but the only one that’s freestanding. New York architect and interior designer William Sofield, the soft-spoken tastemaker (and AD100 honoree) who has been designing spaces for Harry Winston since 2008, handled the prestigious assignment.

The architect envisioned a store that reflects a shape-shifting Chinese approach to space. “I’ve always been an admirer of classic Chinese architecture, and what I find amazing about it is the abstraction of the buildings,” Sofield says. “They can be small but feel very large or be very large and feel very small. I wanted to create a building that was intimate but also monumental.”

His Shanghai structure is composed of volumes cunningly sculpted to make the 3,500-square-foot building’s relatively small footprint seem vast. It starts with the narrow but towering entrance, a feature derived from the high gates and slender alleyways typical of Shanghai’s 19th-century Shikumen architecture. The oval atrium—featuring a black-and-white marble floor that references the company’s Fifth Avenue location—is only about 25 feet in length, but it shoots all the way to the top of the building, narrowing here and broadening there, thanks to plaster shaped into compound curves that, Sofield notes, “nobody is used to doing nowadays.”

At the atrium’s apex is a dazzling elliptical skylight that pours natural light into the heart of the store—cascading down the winding bronze-accented metal staircase and dancing across faceted jewels nestled in angular bronze-framed display cases. The windowless private viewing rooms, on the other hand, are limned with indirect cove lighting that gives the impression of sunshine filtering in through discreet openings along the tops of the walls.



Few of the shop’s walls are set at right angles, and no room is perfectly square. As a result, the building seems to evolve before one’s eyes, folding and unfolding like a Chinese screen.

Sofield also played with the relationship between exterior and interior. Much of the façade is clad in zigzagging panels of glass (another Chinese-screen effect), some of which are clear and others covered in gold, referencing the ancient technique of églomisé. In some places the gold covers the glass completely, while in others it is applied thinly enough to admit light, “as through a fog,” the architect explains. This also means that the street traffic is obscured without being obliterated.

“Traditionally jewelry stores are a bit vaultlike, and that old-guard environment has become off-putting to a lot of people,” Sofield says. In his design, shoppers are “aware of the city but not in a distracting way,” he adds. “The interior feels protected and simultaneously open. I’m a bit of a claustrophobe, so I think that wildly influences my aesthetic.”

Harry Winston is located at 188 Tai Cang Road in Shanghai; 011-86-21-2310-6868;

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/blogs/daily/2012/06/harry-winston-shanghai-boutique-william-sofield

Et là, pas de passerelle... (on peut en rire, pas de dégats humains!)