ZANADU Travel Experience Space

ZANADU, a premium lifestyle travel platform, offers affluent Chinese travellers a suite of luxury vacation products. The online travel agency uses a variety of multimedia, including 360-degree virtual reality (VR) videos, to let customers experience destinations and hotels before making a booking.

Due to demand, ZANADU decided to create a fixed space where customers can experience their travel products in innovative ways. The 600-square-metre space is located at Shanghai Village in Shanghai Pudong.

Designers Shishang Architecture was given the following requirements in its brief: The space should reflect the online ZANADU brand in its first offline environment; the VR technology and experience should be the centrepiece and main attraction for walk-in customers; there should be functional and interactive displays to highlight popular destinations and travel products; and the atmosphere should be exciting and immersive at the same time.

DISPLAYING THE FUTURE
The big idea behind the design is to showcase ‘the travel agency of the future’, to reflect the new way for travel to be booked and experienced. Hence, the design language is tech-driven. The space feels like an exploded pixelated landscape, with ‘clouds’ hanging from the ceiling and cubes scattered as ‘islands’, representing the digital origin of the brand.

The centrepiece is the VR experience stage, where five gigantic digitally stylised balloons invite visitors to take a seat beneath them and start their virtual journey. Twenty destination cubes, fitted with touchscreen monitors, display interactive stories about journeys, products and destinations. Two 10-metre-wide projection screens, and a surround sound system for dramatic audio-visual effects, display a two-minute-long travel film every 15 minutes.

Everything in the store is linked via WeChat, with instant access to product details, pricing or a travel consultant for bookings.

SIMPLE BUT EFFECTIVE
The futuristic store interior is designed to stand out, but it also complements the overall design of the Art Deco-styled outlet village it is in.

The company’s budget included investments in technical equipment, with just under RMB500,000 (or around RMB800 per square metre) for the rest of the interior design. The designers had to find a simple and effective way to fill up the space creatively and meaningfully. The solution was to use cubes, which could be produced affordably and in a large quantity. Apart from the base set of standard white cubes, there are also backlit cubes and cubes covered in other materials, such as artificial grass. Glass cubes form the sales counter, while leather and wood cubes act as seats, creating a physical cyber world that visitors can explore.

PROJECT DATA
Project Name: ZANADU Travel Experience Space
Location: Shanghai Village, Shanghai, China
Completion Date: August 2016
Gross Floor Area: 600 square metres
Client/Owner: ZANADU
Interior Design Firm: Shishang Architecture
Design Team: Chen Xuan; Zhang Tuo; Wang Zhijia
Images: Sui Sicong