Immersive VIP lounges with a cheeky edge
Spanish artist-designer Jaime Hayon is known for blurring the lines between art, decoration and design and he was recently commissioned to design two VIP lounges delivering two boldly styled, exquisitely crafted, and immersive spaces that offer a unique hospitality experience.
Located inside The Hyundai Seoul, the city’s largest department store, and Pangyo in Seongnam, one of Seoul’s satellite cities, the tailor-made lounges welcome young shoppers in their 20s and 30s into a sophisticated yet fun-packed wonderland. Underpinned by Hayon’s signature sense of playfulness, compositional dexterity and superior workmanship, the two lounges are swathed in organic and geometric forms, whimsical patterns, vibrant colours and seductive textures – an operatic symphony of competing yet complementing elements that Hayon fittingly describes as a “jungle of ideas”.
The two lounges are part of Hyundai Department Store’s VIP membership program for customers under 40, a demographic that has recently emerged as the new big spenders of luxury goods in South Korea, and whose avant-garde sensibility and fashion-conscious styling became the basis of Hayon’s design. “I feel close to the generation the lounges are meant for”, he explains. “They are open to mixing and variety – transgressive in a way and this feels close to home for me.” Indeed, Hayon is known for his experimentation, cheeky irreverence and child-like imagination which imbue all his projects, from artworks, to furniture, ceramics and glasswork, to interiors, with an impish sense of fantasy.
