A place for parents and children to bond over books, Duoyun Bookstore in Yancheng prioritizes the needs of young users in an experiential-retail format.

Key features

Three animated films by Italian artist Cristina Làstrego inspire the spatial design of Yancheng’s Duoyun Bookstore. Wutopia Lab drew from the imaginative works of Làstrego to conceive a fairytale-like environment that reaches out to the bookstore’s family audience. Spanning 1,700 sq-m, the space is characterized by whimsical European-style architectural elements, a vibrant colour palette and symbolic design nods. The entry façade is punctuated by a red-and-yellow ‘sailing ship docked in the harbour of the book sea’. The following journey takes on the metaphor of an ark, with a lighthouse-esque book tower, abstract black ‘forest’ corridor, cloud-themed café and a drawing library imagined as an ocean. On the latter’s roof is a multipurpose event hall – otherwise known as the ‘Gold Mountain – situated with a glass house. Outside on the terrace there sits a circus-themed, perforated-metal tent with a carousel. 

FRAME’s take

Learning spaces are formative to a child’s development both intellectual and imaginative. Bookstores sit in the balance between the institutional and commercial – while they are retail environments, they can be as important to young readers as libraries. Wutopia Lab’s fun spatial story for Duoyun simultaneously plays into the entertainment and experience factor needed by contemporary bricks-and-mortar stores and fulfills the needs of the primary users – children. 

When we interviewed Wutopia Lab founder Yu Ting last year, he said: ‘It’s critical to imagine the world from the vantage point of the audience I’m designing for. When I started designing spaces for children, I realized that my daughter, who was young at the time, saw her surroundings very differently from me, as an adult who’s 1.7 m tall. I’ve become more concerned with the human body and how it interacts and leaves an imprint on physical spaces.’