PLEATSMAMA Store by COV Studio – A Market-Rooted Retail Interior that Weaves Tradition, Craft, and Circular Design

Inside the bustling texture of Gwangjang Market in Seoul, COV Studio has crafted PLEATSMAMA’s second flagship—a store conceived not as a conventional retail box but as a walkable, breathable spatial experience. The pleated knit bag brand, known for sustainability and circularity, is translated into architecture through layering, tactility, and the poetic reuse of everyday materials. Here, shoppers are not mere consumers—they are neighbors passing through a familiar scene, invited to pause, touch, and inhabit design with renewed awareness.

Rather than imposing itself onto the historic market, the store absorbs its rhythms—merchants calling, fabrics rustling, footsteps shifting—and transforms them into space. The project asks a simple yet radical question: What if a store behaved like a street?

Designing Experience Over Display — A Market Transformed into Architecture

The flagship interprets the temporal patterns of Gwangjang Market—movement, exchange, collisions of old and new—through materials, light, and modular spatial elements.

• 1F – Street LayerA translucent façade of corrugated Lexan polycarbonate emits diffused light, like early morning sun softening fabric stalls.Furniture varies in scale and shape, creating a landscape rather than product shelves.A mirror cabinet repurposed from a mother-of-pearl wardrobe connects tradition and reinterpretation.The floor lighting gradient and display arrangement evoke the flow of market foot traffic.
• 2F – Signature LayerThe upper level is defined by PLEATSMAMA’s diagonal hanger system, inspired by the logic of a Korean binyeo hairpin.Modules attach and detach like pleats unfolding—an architecture of movement, not permanence.Brushed metal frames meet natural wood veneer, balancing cool refinement with market warmth.

This retail environment is not observed from the outside—it is walked through, engaged with, rearranged, much like a marketplace that transforms daily.

Materiality as Identity: Pleats Rendered in Steel, Acrylic, Wood, & Light

The store’s design vocabulary emerges from everyday materials reinterpreted through pleated logic.

• Corrugated steel roof → rhythm of folds, shadows like woven textiles
• Transparent acrylic drawers → pleats refracted in light + product visibility
• Reclaimed wood pillars → time-etched surfaces as anchors of memory
• Recycled acrylic benches filled with plastic chips → circularity made visible

Nothing is merely decorative—form equals function, display equals storage, and structure doubles as visual identity. Furniture is fully demountable, supporting spatial changes and reducing material footprint over time.

The result is a retail interior guided by reuse, modularity, disassembly, and longevity, mirroring the brand’s commitment to natural circulation rather than waste.

A Dialogue Between Past & Present — Gwangjang Market Inside PLEATSMAMA

PLEATSMAMA Store becomes a cultural condenser—traditional market + modern eco-brand folded into one space. Handled materials, aged textures, and updated craft sit beside sleek modular metal structures, embodying a duality of memory and future.

The store exists in two parallel identities:

➤ PLEATSMAMA inhabits Gwangjang Marketthrough modest materials, familiar textures, public openness

➤ Gwangjang Market inhabits PLEATSMAMAthrough pleated forms, reuse, shared movement, and marketplace choreography

This is not a store to be passed by—it is a place to linger, to understand material life cycles, and to witness sustainability as culture, not trend.

All the Photographs are works of Yongjoon Choi