By: Tom
Wuhan, China, October 2026. This October, SKP unveils A Decade, Refined, an exhibition examining a decade of architectural and design evolution that has shaped a luxury retail brand. Curated around the transformation of SKP’s identity and its deepening relationship with cities across China, the show opens in the atrium of SKP Wuhan.
Timed to coincide with the SKP × WWD Global Fashion and Beauty Summit, the exhibition also offers a public preview of SKP Hangzhou and SKP Guangzhou, the brand’s next two major destinations.
Drawing its title from the Chinese idiom of dedicating ten years to forging a single sword, the exhibition frames SKP’s architectural journey as a sustained exercise in refinement. It reflects more than two decades of accumulated thinking across different cities, scales and contexts, distilled into an evolving design language.
Developed in partnership with longstanding architectural collaborator Sybarite, A Decade, Refined is organised around a principle embedded in SKP’s built environment: architecture as a journey.
SKP Wuhan and K Avenue were designed around the act of the promenade, a sequence of spaces, encounters and experiences that unfold through movement. Stretching east along the Chu River, K Avenue extends the SKP experience beyond the department store envelope and into the city itself, bringing a dense concentration of flagship architecture into a human-scaled pedestrian landscape.
A Decade, Refined follows the same narrative logic.
Tracing SKP’s architectural trajectory since the brand transformation of SKP Beijing in 2016, the exhibition assembles architectural models, drawings, archival material, photography and design details to show not just where SKP stands today, but how it got there, from Beijing through Xi’an, Chengdu and Wuhan, and onward to the forthcoming destinations in Hangzhou and Guangzhou.
A Coherent Design Language
The story begins before SKP Beijing, when Sybarite was selected through an international competition held by SKP and MAD Network to convert an existing 140,000-square-metre regional shopping mall into a new luxury department store.
SKP and Sybarite approached the project as a holistic transformation rather than a conventional redevelopment. Architecture, interiors, branding, graphics, packaging, wayfinding and spatial choreography were developed as components of a single integrated framework, laying the groundwork for what has become a distinctive luxury retail identity.
Central to this is the SKP Curve, a geometry formed from two parallel lines joined by tangential arcs. Conceived both as a spatial device and a subliminal branding system, it established a recognisable design vocabulary capable of operating at every scale, from the smallest detail to the full building envelope.
As Torquil McIntosh, Co-Founder of Sybarite, puts it: “We wanted customers to recognise SKP emotionally before consciously understanding why.”
Evolution, Not Replication
Rather than settling into a fixed formula, that design language has continued to adapt, with each SKP responding to the specific conditions of its site and cultural context. In Xi’an, the SKP language was scaled up and extended to the building facade for the first time, in a culturally significant setting. In Chengdu, the department store was reimagined as a subterranean masterplan, with 99% of the development below ground and SKP Park, a major public landscape developed in collaboration with Field Operations.
Running parallel to this, SKP-S, curated in partnership with Gentle Monster, introduced an experimental counterpoint to the core SKP formula, exploring more subversive, episodic intersections of luxury retail, culture, technology and storytelling.
From Department Store to Urban Landscape
Today, SKP Wuhan and K Avenue push that logic further into the city fabric. Approximately 60% of the existing Wuhan structure was retained and adaptively reused, while K Avenue extends the promenade east along the Chu River through a landscaped corridor of 42 luxury flagship stores. Architecture, landscape and pedestrian movement converge as a continuous journey between department store and city.
It is this principle of progression that sits at the exhibition’s core. Each SKP builds on what came before while responding to a different urban and cultural context, evolving as an architectural proposition and as a model for contemporary luxury retail.
What Comes Next
In the years ahead, the journey continues in Hangzhou and Guangzhou. Hangzhou expands SKP into an integrated mixed-use destination spanning retail, hospitality, residential, leisure and wellness. Guangzhou, meanwhile, opens SKP more directly to the city through terraces, roof gardens, landscape and a new public piazza.
A Decade, Refined brings these chapters together for the first time, both a retrospective on the journey to date and a forward view of what comes next. It recognises a decade of collaboration, experimentation and refinement, while leaving the road ahead deliberately open.
