RECOVERY+

Category: Retail - Interior Design
Location: Times Square, Shanghai, China
Size: 150 sqm - S
Year: 2020

A delicate skin-lightening salon within Shanghai's ethereal Times Square Mall, responding directly to enduring Asian beauty ideals valuing pale complexions — a tradition dating back to the Han Dynasty. Its design mirrors the high-tech light therapy treatments offered, translating the visible spectrum into subtle PVD-coated color accents on functional elements. The intimate interior features contrasting textures: smooth guiding walls and vertically hung, crumpled paper strips lining private treatment rooms, achieved through a specialized sail-making technique. Large, eccentric pivot doors create a ceremonial rustle upon opening, enhancing the sensory experience. Soft curtains and strategic mirrors complete this sanctuary dedicated to contemporary, scientifically advanced skin refinement.

Beauty salon with white marble, layered paper materials, and refined, delicate feminine elements

White space with elegant curves and airy materials for a pure, comfortable, and relaxing environment

Elegant wall-mounted reception counter with soft semi-transparent curtains providing privacy

Reception table crafted from color-changing glass and crepe paper

Door handle detailed design with natural-looking wood and color-changing metal screws

White space highlighting reception desk made of metallic color-changing glass and folded paper

Private light therapy room with vertical strips of delicately creased rough paper showing a complex, textured appearance

Times Square Mall Shanghai, designed by Nendo is female shopper focused and somewhat muted in its declaration of delicate femininity. Light, fragile, pale, ethereal and dripping with white marble.

It is a fitting location for a female beauty salon that unabashedly tuned to the Asian social norms that a pale complexion is beautiful.

Reposing comfortably in this pale environment, we designed this salon to reflect its use intent.

Offering treatments designed to lighten the skin, 'Recovery' is a small yet delicate response to asian social expectations that have transcended centuries and still a signifier of class. Whilst the west chases the sun, the east retreats favoring pale skin as a mark of beauty and status in a practice dating back to the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD).

"Recovery" specializes in high tech light therapy to treat the skin, this being the principal offer we took this technology as a point of departure in developing the salons concept and aesthetic. As to the treatment itself; an exacting wavelength in the visible spectrum is cast onto the body’s skin to generates a paler skin tone - centuries old tradition of desirable characteristic of Chinese beauty culture for centuries, yet here brought right into the 21st century with its science edge.

The private treatment rooms are lined with a series of rough clad vertical strips, whereupon closer inspection are revealed to be delicate crumpled paper that gives its its complex and somewhat randomized and rough appearance.

In opposition is a smooth surfaced wall that leads the visitors eye in from the entry towards the privacy of the treatment rooms.
We developed numerous prototypes in order to achieve the vertical crumpled layers, settling on a ‘bolt rope’ technique common in sail making.

A delicate reception counter cantilevers from the wall appearing effortlessly light and delicate whilst soft diaphanous curtains shield the occupants within from passersby on the outside looking in.

Mirrors at the end of treatment room corridor give the impression of depth, whilst also giving the illusion that each room is not a room but a thickened decorative wall, the illusion is broken once the large eccentric pivot doors are opened - the curves of the door and treatment room wall are spaced so to allow the vertical paper cladding to loudly rub and rustle against one another when opened, a satisfying noise that breaks the usual quiet, and a visceral addition to the somewhat ceremonial feel of opening these large doors.

Accents of colour and an allusion to the visible spectrum are present in small details and articles of function; counter tops, shelving and door handles — as well as screws. The braid spectrum of colour that announce the accents is achieved by a PVD coating, Physical Vapour Deposition, stainless steel components to be coated are encased in a vacuum chamber, and electrically charged, a charged vapour of titanium is deposited into the chamber and particles attracted to the charged surface in a thin coating mere microns thick.