Velvi Tea & Spirits in Shanghai is conceived as an inward-facing interior that rejects the city’s orthogonal logic in favor of a continuous, cave-like environment. The project uses a monolithic plaster envelope, meandering circulation, and a restrained material palette to create a multisensory setting in which tea, wine, and coffee rituals are staged as moments of withdrawal from urban intensity.
Velvi Tea & Spirits Technical Information
- ArchitectsMurong Design
- LocationShanghai, China
- Gross Area393 m2 | 4,230 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2024 – 2025
- Photographs© Xie Yingjian
We avoided symmetry and fixed geometry, allowing the space to form through flow, texture, and sensory experience rather than formal composition.
– Li Lingbo
Between Urban Fatigue and Constructed Wilderness
The project positions itself against the rigid spatial order typical of dense commercial interiors in Shanghai. Instead of rectilinear planning and polished finishes, the design adopts a continuous, irregular language that evokes eroded geological formations. Walls swell and contract, openings taper into pointed arches, and surfaces remain intentionally unfinished. This interior landscape operates as a constructed wilderness, a deliberate departure from the predictability of the surrounding city.
References to karst caves and imagined natural environments guide the spatial atmosphere without literal imitation. The environment is not a simulation of nature but a reinterpretation of its spatial ambiguity and material inconsistency. Within this setting, the program of tea, wine, and coffee becomes secondary to the cultivation of psychological distance. Consumption is reframed as a sensory ritual that reinforces introspection, supported by enclosure, filtered light, and tactile surfaces.
Spatial Organization: Meandering “Islands” and Non-Linear Circulation
The plan avoids clear hierarchies, dissolving conventional room divisions into a field of interconnected zones. Private tea rooms, alcoves, and open gathering areas are distributed as discrete “islands” within a continuous envelope. Circulation follows a meandering path, guided by curved corridors and shifting apertures rather than axes or corridors with defined endpoints. Movement unfolds gradually, with each turn revealing a new spatial condition.
Pointed arches and irregular openings act as thresholds that frame views without fully separating spaces. This permeability allows visual continuity while maintaining degrees of privacy. Programmatic diversity supports multiple modes of occupation, from solitary reading niches to stepped seating areas designed for group events. Above, the rooftop garden extends this sequence, offering an արտաքին counterpoint where vegetation and open air reintroduce the city at a controlled distance.
Material Strategy: Monolithic Shell and Tactile Contrast
The interior is conceived as a single sculpted mass, formed through sand-textured plaster applied continuously across walls and ceilings. The absence of sharp joints reinforces the perception of a carved rather than assembled space. This monolithic approach establishes a neutral yet immersive background, where form and light define spatial experience more than ornament or applied finishes.
Against this abstract shell, a series of natural elements introduces contrast and scale. Live-edge timber tables and stools retain the irregularity of their source material, while river stones line the base of walls, emphasizing contact with the ground plane. Driftwood branches frame selected openings, and ceramic vessels occupy recessed niches. These inserts resist uniformity, foregrounding material origin and process. The juxtaposition of smooth plaster and coarse natural elements produces a layered tactile environment that departs from standardized commercial interiors.
Light, Atmosphere, and Sensory Calibration
Lighting is treated as an integral component of spatial formation. Indirect sources, primarily concealed cove lighting, trace the curvature of ceilings and walls, amplifying their continuity while minimizing glare. The resulting illumination is low and diffuse, creating an amber-toned environment that reduces visual noise and emphasizes depth. Focused downlights are used sparingly to accentuate specific objects or seating areas.
Daylight is introduced selectively through apertures and the rooftop garden, allowing shifts in exterior conditions to register داخل the space without disrupting its introspective character. This calibrated interplay between artificial and natural light structures transitions between enclosure and openness. Combined with the scent of tea, the texture of plaster and wood, and the dampened acoustics of curved surfaces, atmosphere becomes a primary medium. Architecture here operates less as a static form and more as a sensory framework tuned to slow perception and extend duration within the space.
About Murong Design
Founded in 2018, Murong Design is a Shanghai-based creative studio led by Li Lingbo. The practice adopts a global perspective while remaining unrestricted by formal stylistic boundaries, using an artistic and exploratory approach to redefine relationships between people and space. With a focus on high-end residential and commercial interiors, the firm delivers experience-driven environments that integrate material expression, spatial experimentation, and contemporary lifestyle narratives.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Other contributors (Photography): Xie Yingjian
