Casa LOEWE Shanghai and the commitment to 35,536 ceramic tiles.

Walk north from Jing'an Temple for about two minutes and you arrive at a two-storey rectilinear building clad in gold. The tiles are ceramic, handcrafted, and there are 35,536 of them.

The project

They came from a workshop in Barcelona. What they reference, at different scales, is a Spanish leather tradition and a Chinese Buddhist temple — two material conversations happening through one surface.

Casa LOEWE Shanghai opened on 24 February 2025 at 1515 West Nanjing Road in the Jing’an District, consolidating the brand’s presence at Jing’an Kerry Centre (LOEWE has been in the centre since 2013, initially in a smaller unit; the new flagship takes over a former Burberry space vacated in 2021). A reported 695 square metres across two floors. LOEWE calls it the brand’s largest flagship in Asia. Chinese netizens call it the golden box.

The architect is Jonathan Anderson, who was LOEWE’s creative director when the project was designed (2013–2025; since moved to Dior), with LOEWE’s in-house design team in Madrid. The façade tiles are by Ceràmica Cumella — also written as Studio Cumella — the Barcelona workshop run by Toni Cumella (third generation) and his son Guillem (fourth generation). No external architect of record, contractor or lighting designer has been publicly named for the Shanghai project. This matches the pattern already seen at Kith Regent Street earlier in Issue 01, and stands in deliberate contrast to Tiffany Sanlitun’s fully disclosed credits. Two different postures toward architectural transparency, inside the same issue’s argument.

Context

The tile is the argument. Before unpacking it, the place deserves a moment.

Jing’an District takes its name from Jing’an Temple, a Buddhist site originally founded in 247 AD, destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and rebuilt from 1983 onwards with ornate golden roofs and gilded detailing. The temple sits on Nanjing West Road, roughly two minutes’ walk from the Kerry Centre. Around it, the district has been the most concentrated Shanghai luxury-retail corridor for the past decade — glass-clad office towers, international brand flagships, and a high-end commercial development programme that has continued through the recent Chinese luxury slowdown.

Casa LOEWE Shanghai sits in this context. Against the prevailing glass of the surrounding commercial architecture, the building reads as a material outlier — dense, tactile, closed rather than transparent. That is the intended read. LVMH’s own newsroom statement frames the façade as mirroring “Shanghai’s Jing’an Temple nearby, uniting Spanish artisanal heritage with the cultural landscape of the city.” Designboom, covering the opening, was more specific: “The golden hues echo the nearby Jing’an Temple, a historic landmark in the district with ornate gold detailing.”

LOEWE’s own commercial context matters too. Jonathan Anderson’s 2013–2025 tenure as creative director transformed the brand from a dormant Spanish heritage house into one of LVMH’s strongest growth stories — LOEWE generated over $650 million in annual revenue by March 2024 per ARTnews. The Casa LOEWE concept was the retail-architecture expression of that transformation. New York SoHo (2019) established the pattern; London, Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing extended it. Shanghai makes it the largest in Asia and the first to take the concept onto an exterior façade at this scale.

And the Crafted World exhibition — LOEWE’s first public retrospective, designed in collaboration with OMA (partner Ellen van Loon leading), which opened at the Shanghai Exhibition Centre in March 2024 — was running in Shanghai a full year before Casa LOEWE Shanghai opened. The flagship arrived into architectural ground LOEWE had already laid. The cultural programming came first.

The design

The façade reads as one continuous surface at distance and dissolves into individually handcrafted units as you approach. The tile is the project.

The count and the fabricator. 35,536 handcrafted enamelled ceramic tiles — the figure comes directly from Ceràmica Cumella’s own statement. Materials come from the mountains of eastern Spain, per LVMH’s newsroom. Each tile is slip-cast, glazed with a bespoke gold enamel, fired, and installed. Cumella produced the pieces in Barcelona; WWD reports three months of on-site assembly in Shanghai. The tile surface is deliberately textured rather than flat, and LOEWE and the coverage describe the texture as an architectural translation of the brand’s folded-leather work. The scale is unusual but the thinking is not — this is the brand’s product language written in a different material at building scale.

The gold, doing two things. The surface reads as gold because the enamel is gold, but it reads specifically as the gold that’s already in this district. Jing’an Temple’s roofs are one of the most recognisable gold architectural gestures in Shanghai. Casa LOEWE doesn’t replicate the temple — it doesn’t copy the curvature, the roof form, or the Buddhist iconography. It picks up the hue and the sense of a gold-clad volume sitting inside a commercial-architectural surround, and it lets the association do the work. The material is the bridge.

The second conversation is with LOEWE itself. The texture of the tiles — the fold, the ripple, the tactile density rather than smoothness — cites the brand’s leather heritage. LOEWE is the oldest house in LVMH’s portfolio, founded 1846, official purveyor to the Royal Household of Spain, and the leather-goods tradition is the thread through everything. A ceramic façade that reads as folded leather is a specific argument about how brand heritage lives at architectural scale.

Interior as continuation. The tile doesn’t stop at the door. Handmade tiles from Spain line interior walls of the store as well as the exterior envelope — a deliberate erasure of the usual boundary between façade material and interior material. Against the tile run the interior materials of the Casa LOEWE system: marble, brass, oak, glass, in a palette of white, brown, gold, orange, and green. The space unfolds as the concept requires — collector’s home, not retail shop.

The furniture reads as curated conversation rather than product display. Gerrit Rietveld’s Utrecht armchairs sit near azure-blue Steltman chairs (also Rietveld). George Nakashima Mira chairs and Conoid cushion chairs handle darker wood registers. Oliver Gustav sofas provide the soft seating. Tangerine Berin Club chairs and Isamu Noguchi lamps tune the colour. A floating stone coffee table by Axel Vervoordt — LOEWE’s long-standing curator across the Casa concept — anchors the primary grouping. LOEWE’s own burnt-wood podiums and black terrazzo tables hold product. Six bespoke wool rugs reproducing John Allen’s tapestries add colour.

The art and craft programme is substantial. Ceramics by British artists John Ward and Mo Jupp; organic forms by Chinese sculptor Dong Han, a 2023 LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize finalist; leather baskets by Japanese bamboo weaver Hafu Matsumoto; an oak vessel by German woodworker Ernst Gamperl, who won the inaugural LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize in 2017 (the vessel is crafted from a 300-year-old tree). Paintings by Ken Price, Mahesh Baliga, Merlin James, Paul Thek, Uri Aran, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Jordan Belson and Edwin T. Hall. Two additional pieces were reported as “coming in the next months” at opening — a stoneware sculpture Chōtō by Japanese ceramicist Takayuki Sakiyama, and a horsehair-and-stainless-steel sphere by Dahye Jong as part of the LOEWE Lamps Project 2024.

That’s not a flagship fit-out budget in the usual sense; it’s an art-collection budget deployed as a shop.

The build and the cost read

No primary-source budget figures. Estimation with reasoning shown, kept tight.

Façade. 35,536 custom slip-cast and enamelled ceramic tiles from a top-tier Barcelona fabricator, with three months of on-site assembly, on a rectilinear two-storey envelope of approximately 700 m² gross area. For comparable Cumella-scale bespoke ceramic façades — the Santa Caterina Market roof at 4,500 m², various Nouvel and Kuma projects — the façade package alone likely sits in the £3m–£6m range. Smaller in area than the Tiffany Sanlitun façade but similar in register.

Interior. The collector’s-home fit-out carries the meaningful spend. Vintage Rietveld, Nakashima, and Noguchi pieces are auction-market acquisitions — six-figure price points per provenanced example. Add the Vervoordt sourcing, the John Allen rug commissions, the Gamperl oak vessel, the Foundation Craft Prize commissions. Likely range for interior build plus art and furniture: £4m–£8m, heavily weighted toward furniture and art acquisitions over construction.

Programme. Cumella’s LinkedIn references production starting in 2024. Three-month on-site tile assembly places installation in late 2024 through early 2025. February 2025 opening implies a total design-to-open programme of 18–24 months. No indicators of value-engineering. The commission reads as executed to intent.