In Bangkok, a city renowned for its vibrant culture and burgeoning luxury retail scene, POP MART has once again partnered with the acclaimed design firm X+Living to unveil a new flagship store at Icon Siam. This collaboration follows their successful 2022 project, the POP MART Shanghai Nanjing East Road Hongyi Flagship Store, further solidifying X+Living's role in shaping the brand's distinctive architectural identity

The POP MART Bangkok Icon Siam Flagship Store transcends the conventional retail space, emerging to solidify the brand's global cultural influence and its burgeoning presence in the international market. Lead designer Li Xiang and her team at X+Living have conscientiously crafted a narrative thread rooted in the concept of dreams, guiding visitors through a meticulously choreographed journey from exterior to interior, and from the ground floor upwards, through a progression of "Lullaby - Shallow Dreams - Deep Dreams". 

The experience commences with the store’s entrance, envisioned as a prelude to the dream. Here, a music-box-like structure invites sensory engagement, its golden winding key installation subtly signaling the awakening of a fantastical journey. The facade itself becomes a playful tableau, with IP characters peeking from behind beaded curtains on the second floor, while a Ferris wheel-shaped display centered on LABUBU on the first floor symbolizes the cyclical nature of dreams. A rich, vintage color palette imbues the entrance with a dramatic warmth, setting the emotional cadence for the unfolding narrative.

Beyond the entrance, the store’s unique position atop the mall's seventh-floor terrace is ingeniously leveraged. The outdoor façade transforms into a "Theatre of Dream," a dramatic box echoing the brand's ethos of delight in the unknown. Purple metal panels on the first-floor interior façade evoke theatrical curtains, contrasted by a striking, bright yellow on the second floor that highlights the brand's bold identity. A 4-meter-tall MOLLY art installation, adorned in traditional Thai Chakri attire and seated atop an elephant, offers a culturally resonant greeting to visitors. The exterior is further enlivened by pixelated, building-block-shaped furniture, freely recombinable elements that create a whimsical urban landscape for relaxation and social interaction.

Upon entering the first-floor display area, visitors are drawn into the "Vortex of Dreams." This spiral path, a literal and metaphorical shift of consciousness from reality to imagination, gently pulls both sight and body inward, a tangible representation of the dream's allure. The design deftly integrates the store’s diverse product offerings, with distinct branching paths leading to the MEGA Collection and POP BEAN Area, ensuring efficient visitor flow. 

The flowing lines and organic forms throughout this space echo the Chao Phraya River, resolving into the cadence of a musical staff, subtly referencing the opening music box. Floors, walls, and ceilings seamlessly merge into a continuously woven three-dimensional fabric, creating a non-linear, gravity-defying synesthesia where island and wall fixtures shift in synchronized rhythm, weaving a scenographic language that mirrors the staccato rhythm of half-remembered dreams.

Ascending through the vortex, visitors delve into a "Dream Cube" world on the second-floor display area. Here, lines disperse, and the space fragments into a fantastical landscape of recombining colors and structures, symbolizing the dissolution of the dream world. The physical contours of the space contract inward in layers, with a gradient of colors and overlapping structures creating a psychological anticipation of deeper secrets. This non-linear, staggered grid-like order mirrors the form of the pop toys, evolving into a pixelated narrative. The stacked, colorful blocks subtly recall the architectural features of Thailand's Wat Arun pagoda, with countless small-scale modules layered densely yet openly, orderly yet mysterious. Each colourful box within this "pixel cube" world holds a different story, inviting visitors to construct their own personal aesthetic, much like curating a collection of POP MART toys.

The journey culminates at the 2F Café, aptly named "Fairy Tale: Where Dream Meets Reality." This space offers a serene respite, symbolizing the idea that reality can shine with a fairytale-like radiance only after experiencing the dream. For the brand's first overseas Fairytale Café, X+Living drew inspiration from classical Western architectural language, integrating colonnades, arches, moldings, and reliefs. These classical elements are playfully infused with IP characters, who seem to cross over from dreams, quietly blending into reality. The colour palette - a pale blue ceiling evoking a lingering dream at dawn, contrasted with a pinkish-red hinting at warm reality - maintains the emotional tension between wakefulness and dream.

This retail space is through and through an immersive narrative. Visitors ascend through nested dreams, resurfacing into a "real" world that is not the opposite of the dream, but its luminous afterglow. The wonders encountered, the colours absorbed, and the emotions carried do not fade, but settle within as a quiet, lasting echo. X+Living has ensured that every visitor who steps into POP MART continues the story, extending the unfinished dream into their own private epilogue.