COLLECTIVE

kapok is the quintessential lifestyle / fashion index in Hong Kong - it is globally oriented in its offerings, with an ever-changing selection and its presence heavily rooted in Asia. Having been at Sun Street for over 10 years, little would the fashion crowd in Hong Kong denies kapok as the earliest settler that helped defined and morphed the Star Street precinct as it is now.

When COLLECTIVE heard about kapok’s plan to combine their St Francis Yard Fashion and Sun Street Lifestyle stores into a single kapok Flagship, right at the corner store where the two street meets, it was an immediate idea of a collage, to glue the two distinct yet complementary presence together, plugging the two stores right inside the existing symmetrical architecture.

We split the program, open two entrances, with fashion sits on its previous eastward St Francis yard and lifestyle resides on its original Westside Sun Street. The interior circulation of the store is connected, yet this duality intuitively calls for the use of two distinct finishings, cement paired with chromatized steel for the fashion east and a complete plywood enclosure for the lifestyle west as the new palette for a kapok Flagship.

kapok has a unique presence in Hong Kong being the select store that is always changing, like a catalogue from the world that is constantly updating itself - being the type of products, the pairing of merchandises, window displays, events etc.

COLLECTIVE wants to inflate these ever morphing possibilities for kapok, offering a retail space that is composed of physical platforms for kapok’s curatorial merchandising expansion. The design is minimal, with an expanded surface area for flexible displays, composed of rhythmic rainbow sheer chromatized steel shelves in the st francis yard east and continuous wood platform shelves on the sun street west, they are made for the kapok creative team to choreograph their plays left and right.

Architecturally the store presents itself as if a contradiction with its symmetrical yet sharp differences of materials, yet the duality and fusion of kapok’s fashion and lifestyle contain a consistent vision: kapok is meant to be a store of many faces, for discovery, it is never a static realm; you never know what you are going to find, but you know it will always be an object of substance.