Still Young Brings the Outdoors in at Arc’teryx Beijing Flagship

Of all the world’s great cities, Vancouver has one of the closest connections to nature. Surrounded by dense forests, scenic waterways, and snow-capped mountains that offer access to miles of hiking trails and limitless space for wilderness pursuits, the western Canadian seaport is a fitting base for Arc’teryx, a high-performance brand for outdoor apparel and equipment. In contrast, Beijing’s endless urban sprawl might seem an odd location for one of the company’s stores. However, following China’s strict pandemic lockdowns, and spurred by the 2022 Winter Olympics hosted in the capital, the outdoor sports market has grown significantly across the country’s first-tier cities, and demand for suitable attire has kept pace.

More than simply selling clothes to both new fans and veteran enthusiasts of hiking, skiing, and rock climbing, the new Arc’teryx flagship in the trendy Sanlitun neighborhood aims at projecting the plein-air lifestyle of Canada’s Coast Mountains by translating the region’s adventure-driven attitude for Beijingers. “The store interior not only displays outdoor gear but also conveys a connection with nature,” says Eric Ch, founder of Still Young, the Shanghai-based studio assigned the project. Given the context, this decoding required a sizeable amount of imagination and a few reinvented tropes—skills the firm has honed creating a number of much-admired immersive commercial spaces. “To showcase Vancouver’s ambiance to a Chinese audience, we integrated British Columbia’s natural beauty and outdoor culture into the shop’s design, allowing customers to feel its unique essence through visual elements and material choices,” Ch continues, setting the scene.

For an Outdoor Clothing Brand, Nature Serves as Inspiration 

What’s the most recognizable symbol of nature? A tree. To Still Young, this seemed like a good place to start. The studio also wanted the interior to feel rooted (pun intended) in its location, so Ch and his team looked to arboreal interpretations by local artists to find forms that felt appropriate for the teeming metropolis. Working with these artists and a roster of skilled craftspeople, they built a fiber reinforced–plastic sculpture in the shape of an enormous, ancient tree trunk—a gnarled and twisted form that occupies the fully glazed street corner of the 9,500-square-foot, two-story store, engulfing a staircase before disappearing through the ceiling. Clearly visible from the street, the biomorphic structure gives passersby the impression that the emporium was built around a massive tree and not the other way around. This act of botanical reinterpretation, as Ch notes, “became the main source of inspiration, aiming to perfectly blend urban outdoor culture and art with the store environment.”

Biomorphic Forms and Natural Materials Add Visual Interest

Inside, where organic forms and natural-appearing materials proliferate, customers might well think they’re exploring a forest. Clad in glass fiber–reinforced concrete with a wood-effect finish, the walls and ceiling in a ground-floor room dedicated to professional apparel meld into a continuous freeform shell that gives the space the look and feel of a hollow carved into another tree. Similarly sculpted surfaces in the same material feature throughout the interior, defining grottolike fitting rooms or, finished with chalky plaster, creating an events space that resembles a rock cavern eroded by wind and water. Outfitted with sofa seating and state-of-the art audiovisual equipment, it could be a high-tech lounge from the stone age. Artificial-stone outcrops and low bleachers made from piles of what appear to be milled-timber logs are dotted throughout the open areas, creating islands for visual merchandising.

If the store interior embodies these convictions successfully, so too does the facade, which juxtaposes vast expanses of glass with slabs of FRP colored and textured to mimic striated mountain escarpments. But it’s another sculptural installation—a giant pine cone sitting on a platform in the glazed corner window as if it had just dropped from the tree above—that most succinctly captures the project’s multiple intentions and practices. While the 7-foot-tall conifer seed obviously pays homage to nature in a directly mimetic sense, it is also an artisanal object that evokes the realms of art, craft, and sustainability—the last because it’s made entirely of molded pulp from factory waste.

Walk Through the Arc’teryx Beijing Flagship

still young: dawn du; dada zhao; linda li; laura cai; mayi zhang; azel wang; ethan li; cc li; donald lin; ken tao; james xu; abel lu; asha li; douglas xu.