Sophie Hicks’ Acne Studios flagship in Cheongdam, stages a dramatic clash of restraint and raw power, balancing Swedish modesty with Seoul’s restless energy.
Designed by Sophie Hicks Architects in 2015, the project resists the typical tropes of retail design, instead staging a quiet confrontation between modest restraint and brutal physicality. Set within the narrow side streets of Gangnam—a district notorious for its high-speed consumerism and gleaming façades—the building deliberately slows things down, inviting reflection rather than distraction.
From the outside, the store presents itself as a pale, ghostlike box. Translucent, elegant, and understated, it hovers in stark contrast to the neighborhood’s spectacle-driven shopfronts. This architectural discretion nods to the Swedish ethos of modesty, yet what waits inside could not be more opposed. The visitor steps into a heavy, brooding concrete body: raw, unornamented, and unapologetically physical. The transition feels like entering an entirely different register of space, where Acne’s sharp silhouettes and androgynous cuts resonate with the gravity of their surroundings.
The interior is organized around a raw concrete structure that appears almost sculptural in its massing. Four thick columns hold the upper level, while a floating staircase spirals around one, exaggerating the tension between heaviness and suspension. The upper floor offers a revelation: the concrete shell does not touch the glass walls but sits adrift within them, like a ruin carefully preserved inside a vitrine. This separation transforms the building into a paradoxical object—at once fortress-like and delicately displayed.
Materials are reduced to their most elemental: rough timber-imprinted concrete, softly reflective metal panels, and glass that diffuses light into a perpetual dusk. The decision to omit decoration feels less like austerity and more like precision. Each surface is purposeful, each absence amplified. It is a form of architectural editing, stripping away ornament to reveal the bare relationship between mass, light, and texture.
In this tension lies the strength of Sophie Hicks’ vision. The project channels Acne Studios’ dual character: the cool restraint of Scandinavian design entwined with the sharp defiance of its fashion identity. It is a retail space that functions as an installation, refusing to merely host clothing but instead creating a world for it. In Seoul—a city where cultural cross-pollination is constant—the building underscores how architecture can carry the identity of a brand without reducing itself to branding.
