Ren Er
Program: Hospitality
Location: Shenzhen, China
Area: 200 m2
Status: Completed, 2025
Client: Ren Er Restaurant
Photo Credit: Xian Studio
Partner in Charge: Yolande Wang
Ren Er is a fine dining destination in Shenzhen that blurs the boundary between theater and gastronomy. Conceived as both stage and dining room, the restaurant draws on familiar hues and reinvented details from the Republic of China era to evoke nostalgia while simultaneously introducing something entirely new.
Central to the design was the question of how to create something old and new at once. This evolved into an exploration of memory as a design material—ephemeral, fluid, and intangible—shaping architectural language and spatial choreography. Materials and forms interact lightly, creating atmospheres that feel both familiar and fleeting, inviting guests into a world that is remembered and imagined.
Located within the contemporary Qianhai Kerry Center, Ren Er offers a striking juxtaposition of setting and sentiment. The restaurant becomes a temporal portal, transporting patrons beyond the immediate context of the development into an environment suffused with memory, cinema, and dreamlike reverie. Spaces are designed to hold and reflect memory, where the interplay of light, shadow, and reflection evokes the fleeting quality of recollection.
The vision is closely tied to the restaurateur, an emerging actor with a background in cinematography and a passion for immersive storytelling. Inspired by Wes Anderson and Wong Kar Wai, he conceived a space where diners step into a carefully composed set—where memory and perception become part of the design, and guests are both observers and participants in a space that materializes recollection.
Design elements heighten theatricality while maintaining lightness: vibrant yet subtle colors, soft lighting, and reflective surfaces that extend sightlines. Mirrors, windows, and framed openings choreograph views between kitchen and dining room, creating moments like memories glimpsed from the corner of the eye. Patrons move through the space as characters in memory itself, experiencing environments that are at once tangible and ephemeral.
Ren Er ultimately transforms dining into an immersive encounter with memory, cinema, and architecture, where memory is woven into the very fabric of space.
Ren Er ultimately transforms dining into an immersive encounter with memory, cinema, and architecture, where memory is woven into the very fabric of space.
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