MVRDV Wraps Urban Revivo's Beijing Flagship in Colour-Shifting Roof Tiles and Moon Gate Windows

Sanlitun is one of the hardest places in Beijing to be noticed. The district is a dense run of flagships, each one built to outshout the next. Taikoo Li splits the area into two halves. The South Village sells accessible, trend-driven fashion. The North Village is lined with bespoke luxury façades. The new Urban Revivo flagship by MVRDV sits on Sanlitun West Street, the pedestrian link between the two. It is a 4,120 m² retail box for a Chinese label founded in 2006 that now runs more than 380 stores worldwide.

What interests us is how literally the building takes that in-between position. The façade is made of suspended aluminium tiles and tubes with a dichroic coating. Their colour shifts from blue to purple as you move past, so the store never reads the same from two angles. MVRDV frames this as a building that is local and global at once. The more convincing argument is in the details: Beijing roof tiles reworked as cladding, and moon gates cut into a black box as shop windows. The store borrows the vocabulary of the city's traditional architecture. It uses that vocabulary to sell clothes, and it does so without irony.

A Black Box That Refuses to Sit Still

Seen head-on in flat daylight, the building is close to severe: a dark, studded volume with round openings and an illuminated logo. The texture does the work. Thousands of protruding elements break up the surface, so the box looks woven rather than solid. From an angle, with shoppers crossing the paving, the façade starts to catch the sky. The dichroic coating then begins its shift.

Seven circular portals serve as window displays, and the largest, central one is the main entrance. This is a simple, legible move on a street where most façades compete through signage. The circles give the store a face, and that face reads from the far end of the pedestrian route.

After Dark, the Façade Becomes the Sign

Dusk is when the project earns its keep. The pegged cladding turns into a field of small highlights, and the lit portals glow like lanterns set into the mass. Along the long side elevation, the round windows read as a rhythm, not as individual openings. The building starts to behave like a streetscape element rather than a single shopfront.

We think this matters more than the headline colour effect. A flagship in Sanlitun has to work for people moving past at walking pace at night. A surface that changes as you walk is a direct answer to that condition.

Roof Tiles, Recast in Aluminium

Up close, the reference to Beijing roof tiles becomes legible. Curved, overlapping blades are stacked in a dense grid, and each one carries a round logo disc, in the way a traditional eave tile ends in a decorated cap. Under warm light the purple-black finish turns iridescent. A thin line of light along the upper edges picks out the curvature.

This is the strongest piece of design in the project. The reference holds at both scales. From the street it is texture. At arm's length it is a recognisable tile profile, and it carries the brand without needing a sign.

Moon Gates Become the Shop Floor's Grammar

Inside, the circular portals of the façade return as arches and full rounds cut through pale brick walls. Three arches recede toward a lit logo wall, and nested circles frame long views down the floor. The classical moon gate frames a garden view; here it frames a mannequin or a padded blue wall at the far end.

The device gives a large floor plate a sense of sequence. You move through thresholds rather than across an open hall. In a store this size, that is a sensible way to slow shoppers down.

Curved Brick and Framed Niches

The brick walls curve as well as open. One arcing wall holds a rail of black and white garments under soft cove lighting. Elsewhere, a brick-lined corridor runs past a large screen and ends in a lit arched niche of handbags. The mirrored ceilings double the arches overhead, a familiar retail trick. Here it at least reinforces the geometry instead of simply adding sparkle.

Six Bold Rooms, Six Materials

In different corners of the store, MVRDV places six themed "Bold Rooms" for special collections, each with its own material. The daring room uses wooden display boxes, shown here as warm cork-toned shelving behind a white brick arch. The urban room relies on reflective surfaces; one alcove is lined with galvanised metal tiles over a dark floor. Other niches use speckled white stone blocks as plinths for bags and shoes.

The strategy is a material catalogue rather than a single interior language. That is a risk in a store already carrying a strong façade concept. The shared arch geometry is what keeps the rooms from fragmenting into a sample showroom.

The Soft Room and the Steel Room

The soft room is the clearest contrast. A circular brick opening frames an alcove of pale blue quilted panels with a round mirror and lit recesses for garments. Next to it, curved brushed steel panels meet the brick and frame a blue velvet bench. The two rooms sit close together, and the comparison is deliberate: one material absorbs light and sound, the other throws them back.

The sources also describe fabric curtains in the unexpected room that can be swapped to suit a collection or to show work by local artists. A store that can change its walls ages more slowly than one built around a single installation.

Cobalt Thresholds and the VIP Route

A cobalt carpet ties the quieter zones together. It runs through a gallery of arched brick alcoves, along a corridor of curved cut-outs lit by a long luminous ceiling, and up to the curved opening of a VIP fitting room furnished with velvet ottomans. The blue echoes the cool end of the façade's colour range. It also signals a change of pace: these are the spaces for lingering rather than browsing.

MVRDV also designed the signage, clothing racks and other interior details. That control shows here, where seating, lighting and openings feel drawn as one piece.

Plans and Drawings

The concept sketches show how direct the idea is. A horizontal line is slanted at its edges, bent at the entrance and dotted with round windows. A stack of curved tiles is set beside a box pierced by openings of different sizes. An elevation study morphs the openings from a round arch into a bowl shape. The building on site follows these diagrams closely.

The floor plans show a rational container behind the expressive skin. A columned retail hall sits on the ground floor, oval stair cores stand at both ends, and a central escalator void rises through the upper levels. The two atriums are lined with the glass display cases of the avant-garde rooms. They are the vertical spine that makes a four-storey store legible.

The axonometrics show how the circular openings track the façade on each floor. Blue-tinted zones mark seating and lounge areas tucked toward the corners, away from the main circulation.

The upper levels add a planted terrace along the rear edge and a blue-toned lounge in a corner. The final axonometric sets out all six interior rooms across three floors, each with its own mood, colour and shelving layout.

Why This Project Matters

Chinese retail architecture has spent two decades importing global flagship formulas. This store is part of a shift toward brands that want local references without sliding into pastiche. Roof tiles and moon gates are some of the most overused motifs in Chinese design. MVRDV avoids cliché by abstracting both until they work as texture and threshold, not as decoration. The dichroic finish then gives the references a contemporary surface. You read heritage and tech product at the same time.

The building's position supports the concept. It stands between Taikoo Li's mass-market South Village and its luxury North Village, where MVRDV also designed the Tiffany & Co. façade. A store that changes colour as you walk past is a fair description of a brand that wants to sit between those two worlds. The interior's mix of materials is more uneven than the façade. Even so, the project shows how a mid-market label can claim architectural ambition on one of Beijing's most competitive streets.

Urban Revivo Sanlitun Flagship Store by MVRDV, Beijing, China. Area: 4,120 m². Completed: 2026. Photography: Wen Studio, Urban Revivo.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.