More Than a Department Store
We speak with designers Kate Cho and Daniel Song of emerging Seoul-based practice intg. about their design of LOTTE’s Lifestyle Lab
How did the client find you?
LOTTE Department Store, one of Korea’s oldest and largest retailers, was looking for a designer who could transform their existing Culture Center into the Lifestyle Lab. They liked our previous work and our design development process. According to the LOTTE team, they approached us because they felt our design process and design language fits their vision to develop Lifestyle Lab as a vehicle for enhancing customers’ lifestyles.
What was the brief for the project?
In Korea, online shopping is very sophisticated and overnight delivery is the norm, so people prefer shopping online which means that revenue keeps dropping at department stores.
In a time when the Internet is becoming so fundamental, we have to give people a reason to go back to the stores. For decades LOTTE has offered lifestyle classes like cooking, painting, singing and yoga, which they see as a means to draw customers into the department store to do their shopping before or after the classes. It was decided that LOTTE needed a more attractive space for these classes, which is how the Lifestyle Lab concept came about. They also asked us to design a distinctively fresh and modern space to challenge LOTTE’s rather stuffy and traditional corporate image.
We needed to rethink the retail experience, since department stores need to offer an experience beyond shopping. We started with the idea that a department store's identity and fundamental role should be a platform to offer a wide range of lifestyles. A true lifestyle offering is not just about helping people buy goods, but about giving them opportunities to live more colourful and interesting lives. In that sense, we saw Lifestyle Lab as a new and advanced type of department store, and we proposed creating a space where customers want to stay and to socialise.
What makes the space so unique?
We got rid of cookie-cutter classrooms and applied different colour schemes and lighting designs customised for key programmes. There are five studios in total, designed differently with colours and details to fit the functions of cooking, art, craft, cinema and yoga studios.
The yoga studio is designed to offer ChromaYoga-style classes that combine light and colour therapy techniques. By introducing lighting mechanisms to delicately control the saturation and brightness of the light according to the music, we created various visual and audio experiences depending on the intention of the programme.
The studios for the most popular classes — cooking, art and craft — were placed in the centre of the route and connected to the open lounge to engender a vibrant studio culture throughout the centre.
How did you approach the project, and what design references or narrative did you try to incorporate into the space?
The keyword for the project is ‘extend’, and it applies to many different aspects of the design.
Traditionally, the main customers of the LOTTE Culture Centres have been housewives in their 40s and 50s. We thought that since people are increasingly seeking a more interesting after-work lifestyle, we should target young professionals as a new customer base for the Lifestyle Lab. In order to bring in new customers, we needed to ‘extend’ the appeal beyond specific generations, and we felt creativity was a key concept to achieve this goal.
We defied traditional classroom settings and focused on the openness of the space so that people want to stay and relax. We placed a public area in the centre and created a hierarchy of spaces that includes a living room setting, pocket of space for small-scale classes and open spaces to accommodate larger events. Surrounding the public spaces are five studios and five classrooms. We created a sense of height by adding mirrors to the ceiling, and by adding artificial windows to extend the boundary between the interior and exterior.
Please tell us a little about the material choices for the space.
The materials were selected based on the concept of ‘beyond one generation, connecting different generations.’ The lounge area is the first space you see when you enter the Lifestyle Lab. To create a welcoming feeling we tried to maintain a human scale so people can connect to and within the space. While we kept the gathering lounge for smaller groups of people to sit together, in the public space we clustered the furniture sets and placed them above one big rug to create a more central and spacious area.
We tried to balance between being flashy and modest to welcome both new visitors and regulars. For the classrooms, we used FOSSIL tiles by Kasia Zareba, which have hand-drawn qualities. Creativity is at the heart of the space, but since we couldn’t hang valuable art works (due to the limited budget and maintenance challenge), we wanted to use a tile that feels like an art piece while still being very durable.
Please tell us about some of the design details and custom finishes or furnishings?
We collaborated with Poltrona Frau to produce two types of sofas for the public area, and we worked with talented young designer Jungjoo Im to make a wooden doorknob. We personally designed and produced the colourful resin floor plan diagram, which we intended to reflect creativity on a small, tangible scale. Here, instead of relying on typography, we decided to design a floor plan using unusual textures and colour.
Are there any other details about the project you’d like the share?
Architectural elements like columns and major space dividers are left to feel large and substantial, while everything else feels light, transparent and colourful. For example, when you stand in the centre of the lounge, you can see through to all the differently coloured studio spaces. The Lifestyle Lab is located in the centre of a large building with no windows, so we wanted visitors to feel a sense of relief when they came up to the studios after spending hours in the window-less retail stores on the lower levels. We used milky frosted glass to bring out natural light and added plants too.
As told to / Suzy Annetta
Images / Sunghoon Park
