UPI store in Kyoto
Happenstance Collective [HaCo] Javier Villar Ruiz- Type Commercial / Office Shop
- Date 2021
- City Kyoto
- Country Japan
- Photographer Katsumasa Tanaka
This shop for UPI, a company that specializes in equipment and paraphernalia for mountaineering, hiking, and camping, is a work of Javier Villar Ruiz and Tomoki Yamasaki of Happenstance Collective [HaCo]. Blurring the limits between interior and exterior, the design of this ‘outdoor goods’ store for outdoors activities came from reflecting on two ideas: reconnecting with nature, and the surge of online shopping, which is bringing the future of physical retail spaces into question. The project sought to create an appropriate context where products could be understood, fitted, tested, and explained in staff demonstrations and workshops. Hence, the store combines a mini-landscape of growing vegetation and a dry stream with panels where the goods for sale are neatly displayed.