COLORFULL YUJING DESIGN Stacks a Jinjiang Tea House, Shoe Market and Sky Garden into a Five-Level Brand Showroom

Jinjiang calls itself China's "Capital of Brands," and it has earned the title. The city in Quanzhou, Fujian, makes a large share of the sneakers and sportswear sold across the country. It also sits on the old Maritime Silk Road, and that history still shapes local culture. Super JINJIANG, a 275 m² retail building by COLORFULL YUJING DESIGN, tries to show both sides of the city in one small building. It brings local footwear and apparel brands together with tea, souvenirs and a rooftop garden, and it aims to link manufacturing, culture and tourism under a "Made in Jinjiang" banner.

What interests us is the stacking. A brand showroom usually means a glossy box with product on plinths. Here, design directors Sunny Zhao and Ryo Ono put a different program on each floor, from a street-level tea house up to a sky garden, and joined them with a single visitor route. The building works as a vertical walk through a manufacturing town. It uses terracotta, cement tile, plywood and perforated metal, materials that feel closer to a market hall than a flagship store. The result is cheerful, sometimes loud, and more generous to the street than its size suggests.

A Rooftop Mascot for the Capital of Brands

From the road, the building is a stack of glass and perforated metal volumes, slightly offset, with a giant red figure standing on the roof. The mascot is the most obvious move, and the most commercial one. You could call it a gimmick. In a city whose economy runs on logos and brand recognition, though, a rooftop character is an honest statement of purpose. It tells passersby that this building sells Jinjiang itself.

The facade below is more restrained than the figure suggests. Metal mesh screens the upper floors and softens the glass at dusk, and the red neon sign stays modest in scale. A mature banyan tree on the corner does a lot of the work. The architects kept it and let the building sit behind it rather than competing with it, which grounds the whole composition in an existing street.

Terracotta Steps as a Public Front Porch

The ground plane is where the project is strongest. Terracotta tile steps climb up from the pavement and double as seating, with timber blocks set into them and a lattice screen alongside. People sit, chat at small tables and climb past one another. This is a shopfront that behaves like a front porch, and it gives the street something before it asks for a purchase.

The terracotta continues up a lattice tower wall with floral lettering and small balconies. The red-brown tone links to the brick and tile of southern Fujian, though the detailing is graphic rather than nostalgic. Aerial roots from the fig trees hang across painted wall graphics, and folding black-framed doors open the glazed shopfront fully to the steps in warm weather. Inside and outside blur at exactly the level where foot traffic happens.

A Tea House at Street Level

The tea house holds the ground floor, and it is a smart choice. Tea brings people in more often than shoes do, and it gives the building a reason to be visited by locals, not just tourists. Patterned cement tiles cover walls and floor, a corrugated metal ceiling runs overhead, and a green café chair sits by an open glass door with a tree trunk just beyond. The palette is busy, but it reads as a neighborhood café rather than a showroom lobby.

Plywood carries the fit-out: a display island stacked with yellow boxes, recessed shelves holding white takeaway cups with red labels, and a pale tile-fronted counter. Red columns punctuate the space and become a recurring motif on the floors above. The materials are cheap and easy to repair, which suits a retail interior that will see heavy use and frequent changes of stock.

Footwear as Spectacle

Jinjiang's identity rests on footwear, and the display strategy leans into that with some wit. A large wooden wheel is hung with colorful slippers. A wall of shoes dangles from hanging rods beneath a perforated metal panel. Sneakers sit on red-framed wooden shelves against a terracotta tile wall. These displays borrow from factory floors and wholesale markets more than from luxury retail, and that is the point: the building celebrates production volume and variety rather than scarcity.

Timber clothing racks on wheels keep the floor flexible, and tall glazing lets afternoon sun fall across the patterned tiles. The fixtures are deliberately loose. In a building meant to showcase many local brands, movable furniture lets the curation change without rebuilding the interior.

The Stair as Social Spine

On a footprint this tight, the stair decides whether visitors make it past the ground floor. COLORFULL YUJING DESIGN treats it as a place to stay, not just a way up. A bench sits at its foot among the shoe shelves. The perforated metal balustrade is light and see-through, capped with a timber handrail that you actually want to touch. Raking sunlight through the mesh throws patterns onto the floral cement tiles below.

Red and orange steel columns rise through the stair with plywood panels and fins attached, so structure, display and wayfinding read as one system. People sit on the treads and lean on the upper railings. A fitting-room curtain tucks in beside the terracotta tile wall. The circulation is slightly cramped, but it is lively, and lively is what a vertical retail building needs to keep people climbing.

Terraces Facing the Harbor

The upper floors pay off the climb. A balcony with a built-in timber bench and planter looks over the waterfront. A covered terrace frames the harbor through orange lattice screens and a draped fabric canopy. These views tie the building back to the city's maritime history more directly than any graphic could. The sea is the Maritime Silk Road, and it is right there.

The roof becomes a sky garden with an orange pergola, a wooden deck, planters and café chairs above a palm-lined coastal road. A red fabric canopy shades the parapet. For a 275 m² building, giving the top floor over to open-air leisure is generous, and it turns the visit into an outing rather than an errand.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings make the logic clear. The exploded axonometric stacks five floors from tea house to sky garden, linked by a dashed visitor route. The section shows staggered floor levels, the street-side café under its tree and the planted roof. The floor-by-floor diagram pairs each level with its program: tea house, souvenir market, fashion gallery, salon and rooftop garden. Read together, they show that the building was conceived as a route first and a container second.

Why This Project Matters

Chinese manufacturing towns are trying to change how they are seen, from places where things get made to places people want to visit. Most attempts take the form of large museums or industrial parks. Super JINJIANG shows that a small, well-programmed building on a busy street can do some of that work. It mixes commerce with tea, seating and views, and it lets residents and tourists use the same front steps.

The project is not subtle. The mascot, the colors and the pattern-on-pattern interiors will not suit every taste. But the core ideas hold up: keep the tree, open the ground floor to the street, make the stair a social room and reward the climb with the harbor. For anyone designing brand-led retail at a modest scale, those moves are worth borrowing, with or without the giant red figure on the roof.

Super JINJIANG by COLORFULL YUJING DESIGN, Quanzhou, China. Area: 275 m². Year: 2026. Photography by Pixel Force.

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