About this place
Design Playlab's flagship for Laneige — a Korean beauty brand store conceived as a 'beauty theme park', with a red tube circulation element that pulls visitors through layered experiential environments.
The Laneige Seoul flagship store is a collaboration between the Korean beauty brand and Singapore-based Design Playlab, a studio known for experientially complex retail environments that use spatial storytelling to reframe the act of shopping as navigation through a designed world.
The design concept organises the store around a red tubular circulation element — a large cylindrical form that draws visitors through multiple levels and zones, creating a legible directional logic within what would otherwise be a complex multilevel space. The tube functions simultaneously as a wayfinding device, a structural element, and a brand statement: its colour and scale make it impossible to miss, and its presence dominates the spatial experience of the store.
The overall approach treats the store as a 'beauty theme park' — each zone is designed as a distinct spatial environment with its own atmosphere, material palette, and programmatic focus, connected by the overarching circulation logic of the tube. This approach to retail as spatial sequence rather than product display has become characteristic of high-investment Korean beauty and fashion flagships, which increasingly compete on the quality and distinctiveness of the physical experience they offer.
For designers and architects interested in contemporary retail architecture, the Laneige flagship represents a sophisticated example of a specifically Korean retail type: the experiential flagship that functions as cultural destination as much as sales environment.
Retail · Concept StoreInterior · Retail Interior