Social Media Ready

The Gaga restaurants attract a young, well-informed Shanghai crowd that is constantly on a hunt for the new and upcoming. Setting foot into a historic building is not on the top of their list,” say’s founder and director of Coordination Asia Tilman Thürmer.

Gaga’s target audience are young women who are “fashion-conscious and highly digitally engaged”. Healthy eating and living is also increasingly popular with the young Shanghainese crowd, who are well informed and very critical. To attract this clientele Coordination Asia project aim for Changning Villa was a design process that optimises interiors so they can become some of the city’s most covetable Instagram backdrops!

During the design process Coordination Asia used to catch themselves double-checking if their ideas made a good square photo. Along with social-media-ready neon light installations and rooms designed to crop to the perfect square, along with menu styling of the dishes on offer.

Changning Villa sits in the midst of a modern Shanghai, in the shadow of the Raffles City shopping mall. But the building is a relic of Shanghai’s colonial past, originally a part of St. Mary’s Hall, a girls school established by American missionaries. For the historic Changning Villa they wanted the audience to step into a completely different world when entering through one of the old doorways. The interior’s look and feel had to be fresh, friendly and of casual elegance without compromising the character of the original building.