PANE MixC Shenyang Flagship Store is a 132-square-metre footwear store by say architects that brings more than a brand to the city: it carries the memory of the city itself. PANE folds the rationality of ancient Greece and the spirit of the East into everyday shoes, shaping enduring pieces that bridge the classical and the contemporary. As the label moved farther north to Shenyang, the studio wanted its new home to absorb something of the place it was arriving in.
Shenyang’s memory is layered from the old and the industrial. Western-style buildings left from the 1920s stand alongside the heavy industry that later rose with a roar, hard, cold and carrying the blunt weight of machinery. Yet shoes are meant to be tried slowly, seated. “How can a brand that does not wear time upon itself enter an industrial city?” the architects ask. Their answer was not to move a new city into Shenyang, but to invite Shenyang’s own time into the store, a concept say calls ‘The Time Hotel’.
The storefront responds to the undertone of this heavy-industrial city with weathering steel, a metal that slowly oxidises and eventually takes on a brown rust, so that cold, hard industry is warmed by the years. A beige granite column stands at its side, “as if the city had been the first to say hello.” In the front area, an olive-green circular rug encircles a group of shoe-changing stools and a distressed bench, while wooden chairs with blue cushions wait for customers to sit and try shoes at leisure. Vertical-grain timber cabinets and floating metal shelves present the footwear in tiers.
Moving inward, “the door of time truly opens.” The designers visited old Shenyang buildings preserved from the 1920s, recording door frames surrounded by green checkered tiles, meander mouldings and terrazzo floors, and brought those traces into the store. Walls and plinths are clad in deep ink-green glazed handmade square tiles that preserve the original laying pattern of the Liaoning Hotel, interwoven here and there with low-saturation crimson. The warm and cool collision of ink green and crimson recreates the urban heritage of old Shenyang, setting the ‘old’ of time beside the ‘hard’ of industry.
At the centre of the plan stands a fireplace, threading through the front and rear areas and drawing every path around it. Full-height walnut-framed glass cabinets, warm light strips and mirrored extensions display the shoes in layers, balancing presentation with transparency. Beside the fire, an intimate table forms a reception with the feel of a hotel check-in: a brass desk lamp, a vintage hotel key rack, retro sculptures and trophies are arranged at intervals beneath warm, soft light. “Checking in” replaces “shopping”, dissolving the distance of commerce, as if visitors have entered a hotel and stopped first at the front desk to sign in.
That sense of slowness came at a price. The bricks were laid one by one through the night, and time was bought with the speed of urgency. “To make the store slow down, such speed was exactly what it took,” the architects explain. “And so it became a hotel of time: green tiles are walls that have passed through a century, and the fireplace is a corner where winter wants to linger.”
Completed in 2026, the project was led by Zhang Yan and Shan Jianan, with a design team of Fan Yawen, Xiao Yao and Hu Qiheng. Lighting design is by Hangzhou Light Track Lighting Design and Kezimi Trading, soft furnishings are by Home Gallery and YIJI, and the photography is by Wen Studio.
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