Tiffany Sanlitun and the case for demountable luxury.

It is tempting, standing at the crossroads of northern Taikoo Li Sanlitun in front of a four-storey building wrapped in 20 metres of curving translucent glass, to read this flagship as a new thing. It is not.

The project

Tiffany & Co.’s new Beijing flagship is the fifth chapter in a continuous architectural conversation that MVRDV has been running with the brand since 2023 — and read in that register, it makes more sense and becomes more interesting.

The flagship opened commercially in December 2025 as part of the concentrated Sanlitun luxury-retail cluster, and Tiffany held a formal ribbon-cutting ceremony in mid-March 2026 to coincide with the launch of the Birds in Bloom archival exhibition of Jean Schlumberger works, running 1 April to 27 May 2026 inside the store. The architect is MVRDV, Rotterdam. Founding partner Jacob van Rijs leads the project with interior head Aser Gimenez Ortega; AT ZERO DESIGN LIMITED is the co-architect of record; Permasteelisa Gartner Hong Kong delivered the façade; Cooley Monato Studio handled the lighting integration. The interior is by Tiffany & Co.’s in-house design team. The landlord is Swire Properties. Photography is credited © Tiffany & Co.

Every credit is publicly disclosed, which in the context of this issue’s UK counterpart is worth naming: Kith Regent Street, reviewed separately in Issue 01, discloses its architect and creative director but withholds its UK architect of record, contractor, lighting designer and millworker. Tiffany and MVRDV do the opposite. The architectural transparency is not incidental to the project’s posture — it sits with the design argument.

Context

The site is 1,000 m² across four storeys, rising to 20 metres. It occupies a crossroads in the northern section of Taikoo Li Sanlitun — Swire Properties’ 2008 open-plan luxury mall that completed a three-year renovation in late 2025. That renovation matters to this case study because Sanlitun in December 2025 is the most concentrated architectural-materials moment in global luxury retail this cycle.

Within approximately one month and a hundred metres, three translucent glass facades opened by three different architects. Jun Aoki & Associates delivered Maison Louis Vuitton Sanlitun on 19 December 2025 — a four-storey dichroic glass skin composed of more than three hundred hand-curved panels, drawing on Taihu scholar’s rocks and a Nicolas Ghesquière silver dress from Louis Vuitton’s Spring-Summer 2016 finale. MVRDV delivered Tiffany in the same window. Hermès, in situ by April 2026, is an RDAI and Mamou-Mani ceramic-tile facade covered separately in Issue 01’s first case study. Dior and Alaïa (Halleröd, marble) sit within the same district. The Beijing News reported 171 brand debuts attracted by the Sanlitun renewal; Sanlitun’s H1 2025 visitor numbers were 46.81 million, up 33.5 per cent year on year.

The Tiffany flagship sits inside this moment, and MVRDV’s project is legible as a response to it. Luxury retail in Beijing in late 2025 is being negotiated at the scale of the façade, and translucent glass is the medium multiple brands and architects have converged on. The material is doing the arguing.

Tiffany’s own commercial logic is also readable. Since LVMH’s January 2021 acquisition, the brand has accelerated its China investment programme. Chengdu Taikoo Li opened at the start of 2025 as Tiffany’s first triplex flagship in the country. Beijing Sanlitun is the capital-city follow-up. Kengo Kuma’s nine-storey Tiffany Ginza flagship in Tokyo, completed in 2026, runs in parallel as the Japan chapter of the same programme. Tiffany under LVMH is using flagship architecture across Asia as a coordinated brand argument, and each flagship gets its own architect.

The design

The façade is the project. MVRDV’s scope is the envelope plus architectural coordination; the interior is Tiffany’s in-house team. The expressive argument lives on the exterior.

Vertical glass fins wrap the full four-storey height, each fin translucent and textured with subtly curved edges. The glass is recycled and locally manufactured — MVRDV is specific on both points. The fins carry a natural blue tone independent of any applied finish; the colour intensifies as light passes through multiple layers. Viewed head-on, the façade reads as a continuous surface; viewed from an angle, the fins compress and overlap, producing the layering effect MVRDV built the piece around.

The design inspiration MVRDV cites is Elsa Peretti’s Bone Cuff — the sculptural silver bracelet Peretti designed for Tiffany from the mid-1970s, organic in form, wrapping the wrist in a single fluid gesture. The translation from bracelet to building is held in the curvature of the fins. What Peretti did with metal around a wrist, MVRDV does with glass around four storeys.

Lighting is integral, not applied. Cooley Monato Studio coordinated the integration of illumination directly into the custom mounting brackets that hold the fins. The hardware is invisible because it sits inside the structural element. At night, the building reads as a Tiffany Blue lantern from the street — Ledru’s own phrase, on the record to WWD: “Combining Tiffany’s history of glassmaking with architecture and illumination, the façade stands as a contemporary interpretation of our enduring identity.” The reference is to Louis Comfort Tiffany’s late-nineteenth-century stained-glass and lamp heritage, given a four-storey architectural reading.

The most distinctive architectural move on the project — and the one the coverage has not interrogated — is demountability. MVRDV: “The façade is designed to be demountable, allowing the glass fins and mounting brackets to be removed without damage and enabling the possibility for these components to be reused or recycled at the end of their lifespan.” In luxury-retail flagships, where the economic incentive has historically pulled toward bespoke, single-use envelope systems, this is rare. A four-storey translucent glass envelope designed as a kit of parts rather than a one-off statement commits to a different material lifecycle than most of its peers. It is consistent with MVRDV’s broader practice position on circular architecture — Winy Maas and colleagues have pursued demountable facade systems in the studio’s public output for years — but the extension into luxury retail specifically is worth noting as precedent.

The interior, though outside MVRDV’s scope, carries the material argument forward in a different register. Crystal chandeliers meet a champagne gold leaf ceiling on the ground floor; handcrafted walls with gilded accents frame the iconic-works and watches display. A bronze sculpture titled “Pair” by British sculptor Tony Cragg (Turner Prize 1988) sits at the foot of the staircase. On the second floor, a commissioned installation by Michelangelo Pistoletto titled “Color & Light” anchors the romantic-themed art space; an Audrey Hepburn Sector displays a handwritten letter by Hepburn. Throughout: a vintage 1900 Tiffany dogwood table lamp (a Louis Comfort Tiffany heritage piece), and a commissioned work by Chinese artist Xiyao Wang titled “Endless Blue No. 3.” Product categories are HardWear, Lock, Knot, T, and Tiffany watches.

Read as a whole building, the interior is a curated retail museum and the façade is the architectural statement. Read as the fifth chapter in MVRDV’s Tiffany series, the façade matters more.

The series

The argument is serial, not singular.

MVRDV’s first Tiffany project — Singapore Changi Airport, October 2023 — was a 3D-printed screen made from recovered ocean plastic, organised around a coral pattern. A sustainability-forward material experiment at small scale, in an airport retail setting. Chapter one tested recycled plastic.

Cancún, Mexico — the second chapter, organised around the same coral pattern as Singapore but at flagship scale. Chapter two extended the coral reference and the recycled-material logic into a destination retail context.

Shanghai Taikoo Li Qiantan, July 2024 — a glass “diamond” facade composed of 6,988 handcrafted glass diamonds. Also in a Swire Properties Taikoo Li development, also a translucent glass envelope, but with the most literal Tiffany material reference. Chapter three tested glass at extreme component density.

Stuttgart, December 2024 — iridescent ceramic diamonds cladding the façade. The material shifts from glass to ceramic without losing the diamond formal language. Chapter four tested ceramic.

Beijing Sanlitun, December 2025 — back to glass, but now in a curving, organic register inspired by Peretti’s Bone Cuff rather than a diamond. Chapter five closes the series to date.

Three observations from the series read. First, each chapter treats the façade as the architectural statement — the interior is typically delivered by Tiffany’s in-house team — which means the series is specifically a façade experiment programme, not a comprehensive retail-architecture programme. Second, the material rotates deliberately: ocean plastic, coral-pattern reinterpretation, glass diamonds, ceramic diamonds, glass fins. The form-giving reference always ties back to Tiffany design language (diamonds, cuffs, gemstones, organic curves), but the material is where the experiment happens. Third, MVRDV’s material-led luxury-retail façade programme is not Tiffany-exclusive — the practice has delivered comparable material-led façades for Chanel and Bulgari. Tiffany is the longest-running client inside a broader MVRDV programme.

Tiffany is buying a continuous architectural conversation from MVRDV rather than a stable brand template. That is a different model from Jun Aoki-at-Louis-Vuitton (consistency across a long tenure) or RDAI-at-Hermès (a house practice delivering a brand standard). Tiffany under LVMH is buying variety within a curated band. Chapter five is what that variety looks like when the assignment is a Beijing flagship at a translucent-glass moment.

The build and the cost read

Kept tight. No primary-source cost or programme figures published.

The scope signals do the work. Permasteelisa Gartner’s involvement is the clearest indicator — the firm is the global specialist for bespoke curtain walls and architectural envelopes, delivering the Apple flagships, BIG towers, Foster projects. A 1,000 m² envelope of custom curved translucent glass fins at four-storey height with integrated bracket-mounted lighting and demountability engineering sits comfortably in the £5m-£15m range for the façade alone on Permasteelisa-style programmes. The demountable bracket system is engineering-heavy and adds cost over a fixed-system equivalent — the capital is deployed with intent to retain material optionality, which is itself part of the architectural argument.

The interior is a separate cost centre, delivered by Tiffany in-house. The art programme alone — commissioned works by Pistoletto and Cragg, the Xiyao Wang piece, plus the heritage 1900 dogwood lamp — is a substantial cultural-retail investment on top of the fit-out. Likely interior build-out range for a 1,000 m² luxury flagship of this specification: £3m-£6m, excluding art commissions.

Design programme ran from approximately 2023 through 2025 per the Afasia project meta; commercial opening December 2025; ribbon-cutting March 2026. No indicators of value-engineering. No indicators of cost over-run in the coverage.