Japanese lantern: A luminous skincare store and spa on Madison Avenue evokes the Japanese provenance of its products and is a lantern on the busy street - Architecture Research Office designs the Qiora Store and Spa for Shiseido, New York City, U.S - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2002 by Penny McGuire

The Qiora Store and Spa on Madison Avenue was designed, by Architecture Research Office (ARO), to sell Shiseido skincare products in the most seductive manner possible. Shiseido is Japanese, and in their design of the store, the architects have alluded to the firm's provenance through abstraction: through clear simple forms and the ambiguity that, blurring boundaries, is created by the continual play between translucent and opaque, between light and shadow.

Apart from the service rooms ranged down the south wall at the back, everything is curved to make space flow within the lofty wedge-shaped interior. Three cylindrical cabins floating across the wedge mark an informal division between the retail zone at the front and spa at the back. Vertical hard surfaces are obscured by diaphanous veils of stretched organza and are used throughout the interior to form delicate collages of light and colour. In the retail zone, the fabric defines consultation areas and reception; within the spa, it shrouds the cabins and more intimate places for relaxation. Inside each cabin, opaque walls are lined with soft suede-like material.

Lighting has been considered an intrinsic part of design, as substantial an element as the materials. Dimmed and fabric-diffused flourescents around the interior's perimeter are concealed so no fixtures distract the eye, and luminance, creating a radiant glow on the skin, induces the sensation of daylight. Elegant little bottles and jars containing lotions and potions are displayed on glass shelves, their minutely distorted forms suspended in light. During the day, the fibreoptic fittings emit changing shades of white. After dark, lighting and fabric become stained with blue.

At night, the store becomes a lantern on Madison Avenue. Stepping through the door from the busyness and noise of the street you find yourself enveloped in a soft glowing interior and becalmed in light.