Bookshop Reading Mi reflects Panorama Design Group’s ambition to create a new cultural space for families in Foshan.

Key features
Initiated by retail brand Yoyi Book, the concept for bookstore Reading Mi focuses on integrating reading with social and cultural activities, specifically for families. The retailer’s latest outpost, located in a Foshan shopping mall, combines the book-retail space with a café, family zone and 100-seat theatre. Panorama Design Group conceived the 2,500-sq-m store as a ‘haven of calm’ amidst the busy shopping site, utilizing wood and a neutral, warm-tone colour palette.

The entry space – a hall of knowledge with a canopy-like, herringbone-shaped ceiling constructed from wooden slats – embodies this notion. Reading Mi’s following spaces carry on the peaceful aesthetic, each with slatted ceiling designs of their own; in the retail area, the overhead is inspired by paper art. The other zones are all designed to give customers a different type of reading experience. In the family zone, for instance, a courtyard is equipped with theatre lights to host storytelling and drama performances. The theatre, meanwhile, facilitates casual reading, press conferences and group study activities (with a ceiling appropriately shaped as an open book). A customer’s visitor culminates at the café, where others can be found reading and studying.

Frame’s take
Panorama Design Groups conceives the bookstore as ‘a testimony to the full soul of a city and a shelter for cultural growth’. Reading Mi supports this idea, constructed with special attention to a user’s emotional connection with space. While grand in many respects, the design does not bombard clients with a larger-than-life interior or quantity-oriented merchandising, qualities that often characterize emergent spaces in China’s thriving bookstore scene. Could this project be a part of a movement toward more intimate, user-focused book retail? June’s Frame Awards winner, a bookshop in Hangzhou, wooed jurors for its timelessness and regard for diversity in reader behaviour. Reading Mi shares similar aspects. Its varied reading zones, family-friendly layout and special design touches make it an approachable, attractive destination for veteran book lovers and growing ones, too.