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Kaiji Teahouse – Jing’an Temple

Kaiji Teahouse’s JiuGuang store is located on the ground floor of a 20-year-old department store in the heart of Shanghai. Facing the pedestrian street, the storefront opens towards one of the city’s most iconic cultural landmarks—Jing’an Temple, a historic Buddhist complex built in the distinctive Tang-Mikkyō architectural style. The teahouse's large, transparent glass façade frames a direct and uninterrupted view of the temple across the street.

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The interior space takes an L-shaped plan, comprising a generous 8-by-10-meter square room and a long, narrow corridor. The street-facing façade spans 12 meters and is made entirely of full-height glazing, while the internal ceiling height reaches 6 meters. All service functions, including the kitchen and storage, are tucked at the far end of the circulation, preserving natural light and views for the central public space. What remains is a near-cubic volume—a space that became the focal point of the design team’s intervention: how to shape a space that evokes the spirit of a traditional teahouse, while resonating with the sensibility of a contemporary, younger audience?

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Rather than adopting a typical scatter-layout commonly seen in retail environments, the design introduces a centripetal organization, drawing the program toward the middle. This gesture not only brings a sense of cohesion to the open plan, but also pays homage to classical Chinese social spatial typologies, as well as the neighboring temple itself. While the layout is inward-oriented, the spatial experience blurs the boundaries between interior and exterior. In a space of such height, the treatment of the ceiling became a key consideration. The expansive glazing and volume already lend the room an openness, while a conventional drop ceiling—frequently used in adjacent shops—would diminish this quality and significantly increase cost. Instead, the designers opted for a freestanding structure—an architectural “pavilion” rising from the floor, rather than hanging from above.

This "Square Pavilion" is composed of steel columns and a surrounding canopy-like roof. It is not a decorative installation, but an architectural insertion that replaces surface treatment with structure, offering both a sense of shelter and a spatial identity. Aside from essential cleaning, the existing interior shell was left unfinished—exposed concrete, textured plaster, and raw steel were all retained or lightly enhanced, making the pavilion itself the true defining element of the space.

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Taking inspiration from traditional pavilions’ “beauty lean” (a structural bench and backrest extending from the column), the designers embedded a series of horizontal platforms—at 400mm, 600mm, and 800mm heights—directly from the pavilion's column structure. These act as seats, ledges, or table surfaces, depending on users’ needs. The classic form is thus transformed into a flexible and intuitive contemporary environment, allowing users to define their own ways of inhabiting the space.

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The main structure of the pavilion is made of galvanized steel, with all columns, beams, and cantilevered light fixtures constructed using paired C-channels. These open sections expose the structure visually while also allowing the integration of lighting tracks, pendant fixtures, and power outlets. All elements that come into direct contact with the body or eye—benches, ledges, tabletops—are constructed from birch plywood, whose warm tactility and softness contrast sharply with the exposed steel. The wood is finished with a custom dark stain, deeper than standard factory colors, forming a subtle harmony with the tones of Jing’an Temple across the street.

While the original design intended a cantilevered roof, structural durability led to the inclusion of vertical supports. The joints between the columns and wood components are realized with traditional dovetail joinery, retaining a historical language while expressing a straightforward, modern tectonic logic. The column heads themselves echo the form of the dovetail, offering a visible, literal expression of traditional craftsmanship translated into a contemporary vocabulary.

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Shopping mall units rarely allow for genuine outdoor presence. Their box-like nature enforces a hard boundary between interior and exterior, with little or no spatial transition. This teahouse confronts that condition directly—not by creating a traditional “interior,” but by treating the inside as if it were an exterior courtyard. The high ceiling is left open; materials such as exposed steel, washed stone flooring, rough plastered walls, and raw cement steps evoke an outdoor construction sensibility. Every detail, surface, and junction is resolved with landscape logic rather than interior detailing, aiming to dissolve the intuitive boundary between inside and out.

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The final atmosphere resembles an indoor garden, where guests feel less confined and more attuned to the rhythm of nature, despite being deep inside a commercial building. The project redefines the possibility of what a teahouse in a mall can be—a place that opens itself to the city, observes its surroundings, and allows for quiet moments of pause. Sitting in the pavilion and looking toward the ginkgo trees and tiled roofs of Jing’an Temple, one finds fragments of history steeped gently into the fabric of contemporary life—like tea leaves unfurling in warm water.

Project Location: Jing’an District, Shanghai, China

Project Type: Commercial/Retail

Building Area: 180 square meters

Interior (Architectural) Design: Aoshu Architecture

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