How Chongqing Zhongshuge by Xiang Li Transforms Retail into a Cultural Landmark

Exploring How Strategic Design Enables Retail Brands to Create Immersive Cultural Experiences that Celebrate Local Identity

What happens when a bookstore decides to become a love letter to an entire city?

Picture walking through a glass facade etched with text, stepping into a space where the floor beneath you reflects infinite towers of books reaching toward the heavens, and realizing that the mountains and rivers of one of the world's most dramatic cityscapes have been translated into bookshelves, corridors, and reading nooks. Such an experience awaits visitors at Chongqing Zhongshuge, a 1,300 square meter retail space that has fundamentally redefined what a commercial interior can achieve for a brand.

For retail enterprises, cultural institutions, and commercial brands wrestling with the question of how to create meaningful physical presence in an increasingly screen-dominated world, Chongqing Zhongshuge offers a masterclass in strategic design thinking. Designer Xiang Li and the team at X+Living have created something remarkable: a space that functions beautifully as a bookstore while simultaneously serving as a celebration of Chongqing's identity, a destination that draws visitors specifically because of the design, and a living demonstration that thoughtful interior architecture can transform commerce into culture.

The implications for brands considering their next retail investment, flagship store, or experiential space are significant. The following exploration reveals how design creates value that extends far beyond aesthetics, touching brand perception, customer engagement, community connection, and the kind of organic visibility that marketing budgets alone cannot purchase. Let us examine what makes the transformation from retail space to cultural landmark possible and what principles enterprises can extract for their own strategic planning.

The Business Logic Behind Destination Design

When a retail space becomes a destination in its own right, the economics of that space shift dramatically. Visitors arrive with different intentions, stay longer, share their experiences more freely, and form deeper associations with the brand inhabiting that environment.

Chongqing Zhongshuge exemplifies the destination design principle through deliberate transformation of a commercial bookstore into what functions effectively as an architectural attraction. The design does not simply house merchandise; the environment creates conditions so compelling that experiencing the space becomes part of the value proposition. The destination-oriented approach represents a strategy that forward-thinking retail brands increasingly recognize as essential for physical locations.

Consider the mechanics at work. A bookstore competing purely on inventory faces significant pressure from digital alternatives that offer greater selection and convenience. However, a bookstore that offers an experience unavailable through any screen creates a different competitive position entirely. The design becomes the differentiator. The physical environment becomes the reason to visit, with purchases flowing naturally from that visit.

For enterprises evaluating interior design investments, the destination design logic suggests a reframing of how returns should be calculated. The value of transformative design includes the extended time customers spend in the space, the word-of-mouth and social sharing generated by memorable environments, the brand positioning achieved through architectural identity, and the media coverage attracted by noteworthy design. Chongqing Zhongshuge has generated substantial international attention precisely because the bookstore's design transcends ordinary retail environments.

X+Living, the studio led by Xiang Li, has built a practice around the understanding that design creates value. The X+Living approach treats each commercial project as an opportunity to add something to the cultural fabric of the host location while simultaneously advancing the business objectives of the client. Dual-purpose thinking represents a mature understanding of how brands can benefit from design that serves both commercial and cultural functions.

Translating Place into Space

One of the most sophisticated aspects of Chongqing Zhongshuge lies in how the design abstracts the identity of Chongqing itself into architectural form. The approach goes beyond decoration or theming. Xiang Li's strategy is more substantial: a design direction that draws on genuine local characteristics to create resonance with the community the space serves.

Chongqing presents particular design challenges and opportunities. As one of the largest inland cities of mountains and rivers in the world, Chongqing features dramatic topography, winding pathways, and a vertical landscape that has inspired writers and artists for centuries. The city's identity is inseparable from its geography. Any design hoping to celebrate Chongqing must grapple with mountains.

Xiang Li approached the challenge by translating the concept of mountainous terrain into the interior architecture. The result is a space where vertical elements dominate, where stairs and ladders create the sense of ascending and descending through landscape, and where the complexity of Chongqing's geography finds expression in the arrangement of books and reading areas. Visitors experience echoes of the city while moving through the store.

Place-based design strategy offers valuable lessons for brands operating across multiple locations. Generic retail environments that could exist anywhere create weaker connections with local communities. Spaces that acknowledge and celebrate their specific location demonstrate respect for that community while creating experiences that feel authentic and rooted. Customers recognize when a brand has invested in understanding their city, and that recognition builds affinity.

The children's reading area within Chongqing Zhongshuge illustrates the principle of local integration beautifully. Bookshelves in the children's zone feature colorful representations of Chongqing's landscape, buildings, and transportation systems. Young readers encounter their own city reflected in the environment around them, creating early positive associations with both the place and the brand. The children's area demonstrates strategic design thinking that considers multiple audience segments and their different relationships to local identity.

For enterprises considering flagship locations or destination stores, the question of how to honor local context deserves serious attention. The investment required to develop place-specific design pays dividends through stronger community connection and differentiation from competitors whose spaces feel interchangeable regardless of location.

The Psychology of Spatial Expansion

Working within a 1,300 square meter footprint, the design team faced a fundamental challenge: how to create a sense of grandeur and discovery within a bounded commercial space. The solution demonstrates sophisticated understanding of how humans perceive their environments.

Mirror ceilings throughout Chongqing Zhongshuge perform visual magic, doubling the apparent height of spaces and creating the impression of infinite vertical extension. The main study hall, described as an Escher-like ladder space, uses the mirroring technique to transform a room of finite dimensions into something that feels boundless. Visitors standing in the main study hall experience genuine awe as bookshelves appear to extend endlessly overhead.

The psychological dimension matters for brands because awe affects behavior. Research in environmental psychology consistently shows that experiences of awe increase feelings of connection, expand temporal perception (time seems to slow), and enhance memory formation. Customers in awe-inspiring spaces remember their visits more vividly, associate positive emotions with the brand, and share their experiences more readily.

The design achieves the awe effect through careful orchestration of reflective surfaces, vertical elements, and lighting. The scattered lampshade-shaped bookshelves in the dark brown lobby create pools of illumination that draw visitors deeper into the space. The corridor leading to the main study hall builds anticipation before the reveal of the mirrored ladder room. The sequence creates narrative architecture, a designed progression of experiences that unfolds as visitors move through the space.

For commercial brands, understanding how spatial design affects psychological states opens strategic possibilities. Environments can be engineered to evoke specific emotional responses that align with brand positioning. A brand seeking to communicate innovation might design for surprise and wonder. A brand emphasizing comfort might design for warmth and intimacy. Chongqing Zhongshuge demonstrates how effectively spatial psychology principles can be applied when the design team possesses both technical skill and strategic clarity.

The mirrored ceiling technique also addresses a practical concern: customers in book retail environments prefer spacious settings that allow comfortable browsing. By creating the perception of expansiveness within actual spatial constraints, the design serves both aesthetic ambitions and functional requirements simultaneously.

When Form Performs Function

The Escher-like ladder hall of Chongqing Zhongshuge contains one of the design's most elegant innovations: bookshelves that function as stairs. Visitors can physically step on the ladder-bookshelf structures to access higher shelves while the overall composition creates the visual impression of an impossible geometry drawing. The ladder hall represents design that refuses the false choice between beauty and utility.

Too often, commercial interior projects treat aesthetic impact and functional performance as competing priorities. The assumption runs that dramatic design requires sacrificing practical considerations, or conversely, that practical spaces cannot achieve visual distinction. Chongqing Zhongshuge rejects the false dichotomy entirely. The ladder-bookshelves work hard in multiple dimensions simultaneously.

From a space efficiency perspective, combining circulation elements with merchandise display maximizes the productive use of every square meter. From an experience perspective, the ability to climb through the book landscape creates interactive engagement unavailable in conventional shelving arrangements. From a visual perspective, the staircase formations create the dramatic verticality that connects to Chongqing's mountainous identity. Each element in the design carries multiple loads.

Brands investing in interior environments can learn from the multi-functional approach. When every design decision must justify itself through multiple benefits, the resulting spaces achieve remarkable density of value. A lighting fixture that creates atmosphere, supports wayfinding, and echoes brand identity delivers more return than one that merely illuminates. A floor treatment that references local materials, performs acoustically, and guides movement serves the project more completely than a generic alternative.

The discipline required to achieve multi-functional integration demands close collaboration between design teams and brand stakeholders. The X+Living process, which emphasizes achieving integration of artistic aesthetics and practical functions, reflects the understanding that form and function need not compete. The most successful commercial interiors emerge when creative ambition and business requirements inform each other throughout the design development.

For enterprises commissioning interior projects, establishing collaborative relationships from project inception helps ensure that final results satisfy both experiential and operational needs. Design teams working with clear understanding of brand objectives and functional requirements can find innovative solutions that a purely aesthetic or purely practical approach would miss.

Creating Experiences Beyond the Digital

The glass facade of Chongqing Zhongshuge greets arriving visitors with text printed across its surface. The text-covered facade establishes immediately that the space ahead concerns itself with words, with reading, with the power of language to create worlds. Stepping inside, visitors discover that the bookshelf reflections on the polished floor form a tunnel of books beckoning them deeper into the space.

The first moments inside the bookstore announce something important: the experience ahead cannot be replicated through screens. The spatial quality, the reflection effects, and the sense of being surrounded by literature made architectural all require physical presence. The experience design acknowledges what digital media excels at and then deliberately pursues what digital media cannot achieve.

Designer Xiang Li specifically noted that the visually stunning environment enables readers to feel the magnificence of the cityscape in a confined space, creating what was described as a fantastic real-life experience that the internet simply could not offer. The observation reflects strategic design insight applied directly to competitive positioning. The design does not ignore digital alternatives but rather creates value specifically unavailable through digital channels.

For retail brands and commercial enterprises, the principle of irreplaceable physical experience has broad application. Physical locations increasingly compete with digital convenience. The response cannot be to replicate online efficiency, which physical spaces will lose. The response must be to emphasize irreducible physical qualities: spatial experience, social presence, sensory richness, and environmental immersion.

Chongqing Zhongshuge creates such rich visual and spatial experience that visitors photograph and share the environment extensively. Organic visibility through visitor sharing represents substantial marketing value generated through design investment. Every shared image extends brand awareness without additional promotional spending. The design works as a communication tool as powerfully as the design works as a retail environment. To explore the award-winning chongqing zhongshuge bookstore design is to understand how physical environments can generate the kind of authentic content that builds brand recognition in ways that manufactured marketing cannot duplicate.

The five distinct reading areas within the space, each described as a wonderland with distinctive features, ensure that the experience rewards extended exploration. Visitors discovering new zones continue generating shareable moments throughout their stay. The design-for-discovery approach encourages the kind of engagement that deepens both immediate experience and subsequent recall.

Building Institutional Presence Through Design

Zhongshuge as a brand has consistently positioned bookstores in the chain as cultural landmarks within their host cities. The cultural landmark ambition goes beyond commercial success to claim a role in civic life. Chongqing Zhongshuge advances the positioning through design that genuinely contributes to the cultural infrastructure of the city.

When a commercial space achieves landmark status, the brand occupying the space benefits from elevated perception. The business becomes associated with cultural contribution rather than pure commerce. Customers feel that patronizing the establishment supports something valuable in their community. The emotional dimension adds layers of meaning to transactions that might otherwise feel purely transactional.

The Platinum A' Design Award recognition that Chongqing Zhongshuge received in 2020 from the A' Interior Space, Retail and Exhibition Design Award category validates the cultural contribution achievement. The recognition celebrates designs that advance boundaries, demonstrate excellence, and may contribute to making the world a better place through design. Award recognition provides external validation that can be communicated to stakeholders, media, and potential customers.

For enterprises considering how design investment positions their brands over longer time horizons, the cultural landmark aspiration deserves consideration. Buildings and interiors that become destinations develop equity that appreciates over time. The initial design investment continues generating returns through ongoing attention, visits, and positive association. The appreciation of design equity contrasts with more disposable commercial environments that require constant renovation to maintain relevance.

The research underlying Chongqing Zhongshuge's design specifically sought elements that could be abstracted from the culture of the city and strike a chord among the public. The research-driven approach to identifying design directions that will resonate demonstrates professional rigor. Brands benefit when design teams conduct genuine inquiry into what will create meaningful connection rather than applying generic solutions.

The broader X+Living portfolio demonstrates consistent application of design-creates-value principles across multiple project types. The studio has worked in retail, hospitality, office, cultural, and educational environments, each time pursuing integration of artistic vision with practical requirements. The breadth of experience informs the sophisticated thinking evident in Chongqing Zhongshuge, where commercial objectives and cultural ambitions reinforce each other.

The Long View on Design Investment

For brands evaluating interior design as a strategic investment, Chongqing Zhongshuge offers a compelling case study in how ambitious design thinking creates multidimensional value. The project demonstrates that commercial spaces can transcend their primary functions to become cultural contributions, community assets, and brand-building platforms.

The economics favor the destination design approach when calculated comprehensively. Yes, distinctive design requires greater upfront investment than generic solutions. However, that investment generates returns through increased visitation, extended dwell time, organic media coverage, social sharing, brand differentiation, community goodwill, and the kind of recognition that prestigious design awards represent. The accumulated benefits, compounding over time, justify investments that appear ambitious when evaluated through narrow financial lenses.

What Xiang Li and X+Living achieved in Chongqing offers a template that other brands can adapt to their own contexts and objectives. The specific design cannot be replicated, nor should the Chongqing approach be copied directly. The principles underlying the Chongqing Zhongshuge design, however, travel well. Celebrate local identity. Create spatial experiences unavailable elsewhere. Make every design element work multiple ways. Build for wonder. Aspire to contribute culturally while succeeding commercially.

The future belongs to physical spaces that earn their existence through irreplaceable experience. In a world where anything can be ordered online and delivered tomorrow, the question facing every retail brand, cultural institution, and commercial enterprise is clear: what does your physical presence offer that makes the journey worthwhile?

How might your next space become a landmark?