Aesop Store on Gough St, Hong Kong

Australian architecture firm March Studio has created a striking store design for skin, hair and body-care label Aesop Hong Kong. The design studio’s 17th signature store for Aesop, located on Gough Street, sits on a bustling corner in Hong Kong’s Central and serves more to preserve the existing heritage building than to innovate with the space.

March’s long-standing relationship with Aesop grew out of a ‘mutual love of material’ and the opportunities different materials present in creating a distinct visual identity. This time, the material was the humble glass brick. ‘By looking at just one material per site, we’re given the opportunity to really explore everything about it,’ Eggleston says, and through this investigative approach and innovative construction techniques, the blocks become an elevated floor.

The floor’s structure, comprising 400 columns and more than 3,000 glass bricks, is Eggleston’s way of ‘preserving the immediate space between the old and the new ground-scape’. Through the transparent blocks, the original flooring and entrance stairs are visible, creating what Aesop retail architecture manager Denise Neri likens to an archaeological section in a museum.

Supported by steel legs and feet, the elevated floor is a visual nod to the vertical city, while the full-height windows provide varying perspectives of the store’s interior and the different street levels outside.

• Photographed by Peter Bennetts
• Bricks in this project: Arctic Crystal - Venetian Glass | Austral Bricks