Wuhan, China — October 2026 — This October, SKP presents A Decade, Refined — the first exhibition to examine how ten years of architectural and design evolution have shaped one of the world’s most distinguished luxury retail brands. Organised around the transformation of SKP’s identity and its evolving relationship with cities across China, the exhibition opens in the atrium of SKP Wuhan.
Running alongside the third SKP × WWD Global Fashion and Beauty Summit, the exhibition also offers the first public preview of SKP Hangzhou and SKP Guangzhou — the brand’s next two major destinations.
The exhibition takes its theme from the Chinese proverb — the idea of dedicating ten years to refining a single sword. Reimagined for SKP, it speaks to more than two decades of accumulated strategic thinking, design refinement and operational experience across different cities, scales and contexts — and to an architectural language that continues to mature.
Presented by SKP and developed with its longstanding architectural partner Sybarite, A Decade, Refined is structured around a principle already embedded in SKP’s built strategy: architecture as a journey.
SKP Wuhan and K Avenue were designed around the act of the promenade — a sequence of spaces, encounters and experiences that unfold through movement. Extending east along the Chu River, K Avenue carries the SKP experience beyond the department store envelope and into the city, bringing an unprecedented concentration of flagship architecture into the human scale of a pedestrian boulevard.
A Decade, Refined follows the same strategic logic.
Tracing SKP’s architectural trajectory since the brand transformation of SKP Beijing in 2016, the exhibition brings together architectural models, drawings, archival material, photography and design details to reveal not simply where SKP stands today, but how it arrived there — from Beijing through Xi’an, Chengdu and Wuhan, and onward to the next generation of destinations in Hangzhou and Guangzhou.
A Unified Brand-Design Language
The story begins before SKP Beijing opened, when Sybarite was selected through a competition held by SKP and MAD Network to transform an existing 140,000-square-metre regional shopping mall into a new luxury department store.
SKP and Sybarite approached the project as a holistic brand transformation rather than a conventional redevelopment. Architecture, interiors, branding, graphics, packaging, wayfinding and spatial choreography were conceived as interlocking components of a single integrated framework — establishing the foundational architecture of a new luxury retail identity.
At the centre of this is the SKP Curve — a geometry formed from two parallel lines connected by tangential arcs. Conceived as both a spatial system and a subliminal branding mechanism, it established a recognisable design vocabulary capable of operating at every scale, from the smallest detail to the full building.
As Torquil McIntosh, Co-Founder of Sybarite, explains: “We wanted customers to recognise SKP emotionally before consciously understanding why.”
Evolution Through Context
Rather than hardening into a fixed formula, that design language has continued to adapt, with each SKP responding to the specific conditions of its site and cultural context. In Xi’an, it was scaled and extended to the building facade for the first time, in a culturally significant setting. In Chengdu, the department store was reimagined as a subterranean masterplan, with 99% of the development below ground and an extensive public landscape — SKP Park — developed in collaboration with Field Operations.
In parallel, SKP-S — curated in partnership with Gentle Monster — introduced an experimental counterpoint to the core SKP proposition, exploring more subversive, episodic intersections of luxury retail, culture, technology and storytelling.
From Department Store to Urban Ecosystem
Today, SKP Wuhan and K Avenue extend that strategic logic further into the city. Approximately 60% of the existing Wuhan structure was retained and adaptively reused, while K Avenue continues the experience east along the Chu River through a landscaped promenade of 42 luxury flagship stores. Architecture, landscape and pedestrian movement converge as a continuous journey between department store and city.
It is this principle of iterative progression that sits at the heart of the exhibition. Each SKP builds on what came before while responding to a different urban and cultural context — evolving not just as an architectural project, but as a pioneering model for contemporary luxury retail.
The Next Phase
In the years ahead, the journey continues in Hangzhou and Guangzhou. Hangzhou expands SKP into an integrated destination for retail, hospitality, residential, leisure and wellness. Guangzhou opens SKP more directly to the city through terraces, roof gardens, landscape and a new public piazza.
A Decade, Refined brings these chapters together for the first time. It is both a reflection on the journey to date and a forward view of what comes next — recognising a decade of collaboration, experimentation and refinement while leaving the path ahead deliberately open.
