Starbucks Kerry Center
Type
Environmental Graphics
Role
Senior Creative Manager, Starbucks
The Challenge
Starbucks was expanding aggressively in China and needed flagship stores that felt genuinely rooted in Chinese culture — not through surface-level decoration, but through objects, materials, and art that carry real cultural weight. The brief: develop an art program for the Kerry Centre flagship in Beijing that would embody Starbucks' "third place" philosophy while integrating the local Beijing context authentically. The risk was falling into cultural pastiche — Chinese aesthetic motifs applied as wallpaper over a global template. The challenge was to tell a story that could only exist in Beijing, in 2013, with these specific people involved.
The Solution
The centrepiece was a wall of hundreds of antique mooncake moulds used to press the cakes served at the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. Starbucks China also served mooncakes, making the moulds a precise embodiment of the local/global tension at the heart of the brief. They were sourced by sending people into villages across China to buy old moulds directly from residents. The objects had history; the wall told it. Students from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing were commissioned to paint traditional Chinese brush work directly onto the live wood counters, connecting the store to Beijing's artistic community. Visual storytelling throughout translated the bean-to-cup journey through the visual language of Chinese brush painting. The Kerry Centre store became the design foundation for Starbucks China's store aesthetic broadly.
