HARMAY HOPSON BY AIM ARCHITECTURE: THE ART DEPOT THAT SELLS LIPSTICK

The premise sounds wrong. A cosmetics store modeled on an art storage facility, located inside a mall opened in 2017 in Beijing's Shuangjing district, designed to make buying a face serum feel like curating a museum collection. It should not work. It does, and that is the problem for every luxury beauty flagship that spent the last decade installing marble counters and gold fixtures. HARMAY Hopson One is not a store that happens to look industrial. It is an argument. AIM Architecture's founders Wendy Saunders and Vincent de Graaf, operating since 2005 out of Shanghai with additional offices in Antwerp and Chicago, built something closer to a thesis statement than a retail interior. ## 420 Square Meters Organized Around a Principle, Not a Product Occupying a 420-square-meter unit set across two floors, the HARMAY Hopson store features an interior design by AIM Architecture, the architecture practice and longtime collaborator headquartered in Shanghai. The footprint is not large. What happens inside it is disproportionate to the square footage. Technical precision and materiality define the sensory experience. The palette is a restrained composition of stainless steel, glass, polished concrete, and timber, materials that feel raw yet meticulously refined. No veneer. No softening. The materials you see in a Zaha Hadid airport terminal or a Gagosian storage wing, deployed to house 16,000 SKUs and 1,300 lipstick variants. A prominent metal staircase anchors the design while connecting the two levels, setting the tone for a highly functional store setting which enables circulation, display, and storage. The varied range of custom-made furnishings on the ground floor range from floor-to-ceiling slideable metal display panels and sleek tiered shelving units to timber cargo box-inspired displays and matching cabinets. The cargo boxes are not decoration. The flagship spans two floors, connected via metal stairs that rest atop cargo boxes, and those boxes are integrated into the stairs and hold product. Circulation, storage, and display collapsed into one object. The kind of thinking that takes a design brief and refuses to answer it narrowly. ## What the Art Storage Reference Actually Means Connecting beauty retail to art handling is not a styling choice. It is a positioning decision with real cultural stakes. The new HARMAY flagship at Beijing's Hopson One Mall transforms the utilitarian logic of a high-density storage facility into a sophisticated retail archive that redefines the act of shopping as a curated, artistic experience. A shift in retail philosophy moves the conversation away from traditional commerce toward a deeper interrogation of how we interact with objects. By adopting the aesthetic of an art depot, the space suggests that beauty products are not merely commodities to be consumed but artifacts to be collected and archived. That reframe matters more than it reads. HARMAY built its initial business model on selling cosmetic samples and distributing international brands outside official channels, a practice Chinese industry analysts described as operating in a grey market. Harmay based its initial business model on selling brands' samples online or by distributing some international brands' products in a not always official way. However, the expert considers the switch it operated in immersive and conceptual retail extension over China contributes to change this image. The warehouse aesthetic is not neutral. It is the brand rewriting its own origin story in concrete and steel. Adaptive spatial systems allow the environment to remain in a state of flux, much like a living archive. Movable metal mesh panels and overhead shelving units create a flexible grid that can be reconfigured as the inventory evolves. The space literally cannot be pinned down. Which is, arguably, the point. ## One Store, One Design, Ten Cities AIM Architecture has been HARMAY's design partner across a decade of expansion. The collaboration is not casual. It is structural. AIM Architecture and beauty brand HARMAY have explored the question of experiential retail through collaborations on past stores, including an outpost in Shanghai's Hongqiao airport, a shop in Chengdu, and another in Wuhan. For the latest locale in Beijing's Hopson Mall, the international practice looked to warehouses and art handling to rethink retail design as something meaningful and experiential. Each store takes a different industrial reference. Chongqing drew from the city's underground factory network; the architectural intervention by AIM Architecture in Chongqing is noteworthy, situated below street level, creating an ambiance characterized by a massive conveyor belt, generators, and an array of industrial apparatus. Hong Kong went apothecary: hundreds of stainless steel drawers line the walls of the Hong Kong cosmetics store, designed by AIM Architecture to emulate a traditional apothecary. Hangzhou became a 1970s office. Shanghai studio AIM Architecture transformed the second floor of a business park in Hangzhou into a store that resembles a 1970s office for cosmetics brand Harmay. Like all Harmay locations, each new store continues the brand's one store, one design ethos. That constraint is the creative engine. The warehouse vocabulary stays consistent. The specific industrial reference changes with geography. The result is a network of stores that feel related but never identical, which is the opposite of how global beauty retail has operated for thirty years. By April 30, 2025, HARMAY has 16 stores in 10 China cities, serving 175,000 customers weekly. Dezeen named AIM Architecture its China Interior Design Firm of the Year in 2023, with judges citing that the Shanghai-based studio has shown its versatility across all typologies, but most notably in a wide variety of impressive retail projects, with work that is bold and emotive, while always respecting the local environment. ## The $200 Million Question Nobody Is Asking About Retail Design China-based retail beauty brand Harmay has closed its Series C and D rounds of financing, raising a combined $200 million. The retailer has also acquired Kevyn Aucoin Beauty. General Atlantic led the Series C. The Series D was led by QY Capital, with Eastern Bell Capital, N5 Capital, Ocean Link, Hillhouse Venture, and BA Capital among the co-investors. That capital did not fund marble. It funded mesh panels, cargo boxes, and perforated pegboard. Juliette Duveau of consulting agency The Chinese Pulse identified the underlying logic clearly: the main reason why capital invests in Harmay is that they have the recipe to attract consumers and especially the GenZ generation. The design is not incidental to that recipe. It is the recipe. Some consumers will still buy normal size in Harmay because it is a convenient shopping destination for them to collect all the products they want, and they will also pay for the immersive, cool experience to reshare. The business case for industrial retail aesthetics is not aesthetic. It is behavioral. Consumers treat the space as a destination, not a transaction point. That changes the economics of physical retail entirely. HARMAY offers 112 categories and 16,000 products, including 1,300 lipsticks. That density of product inside a warehouse-logic space is not accidental. The visual organization of a storage facility makes 16,000 SKUs legible. A conventional beauty counter would collapse under that weight. ## The Counterargument Worth Taking Seriously There is a version of this story where HARMAY's industrial aesthetic is a moment, not a method. The warehouse look has spread far beyond HARMAY, from Soho boutiques to Berlin concept stores, and when every brand's flagship looks like a loading dock, the original loses its specificity. AIM Architecture's answer to that, across the Hopson store specifically, is that the reference is not warehouse. It is art storage. The distinction matters. Art storage facilities are not about roughness. They are about precision, control, and the treatment of objects as irreplaceable. By repurposing the language of art handling for a democratic retail setting, the project suggests that the care and order we apply to preserving art can be applied to the way we structure our daily lives. That is a harder position to copy than exposed brick. It requires a brand willing to elevate its product to the status of artifact, and a customer willing to believe it. Opened in 2017, the Hopson One shopping centre in Beijing has since become a highly popular destination for the city's Millennial and Gen Z shoppers. The Chinese consumer market has seen a sharp increase in home-grown brands in the past decade, whose quality products have not only resonated with that client base but also changed the ball game. HARMAY is not competing with Sephora. It is competing with the idea of Sephora. The Hopson store is the clearest version yet of what that ambition looks like at 420 square meters, two floors, and a metal staircase that is also a shelf. AIM Architecture's next move will tell the real story. The firm is expanding into hospitality and mixed-use, and its Cotton Park project, converting former oil silos in Changzhou into a community space, was shortlisted for the 2025 Dezeen Awards. The industrial vocabulary that built HARMAY's identity is now being tested at urban scale. If it holds, the Hopson store will look less like a retail interior and more like the first proof of concept for something much larger.