USM Showroom in Shanghai by Halleroed

It’s safe to say that everyone is very familiar with IKEA’s super clever business model of aspirational home displays — enticing anyone who walks past into popping a spare RÄFFELBJÖRK in the trolley just because it looks so nice in its entirely faux living room. Well, the Swedes have done it again, and this time, it’s a serious step up from IKEA.

For USM’s private showroom in Shanghai, Stockholm-based Halleroed took 130 square metres of showroom and made a real home, creating a space for private clients to view USM’s Modular Furniture.

The result is a considered and clean apartment inspired by Scandinavian minimalism and mixed with Italian classics. It leaves clients with an innate sense of cosiness that suggests it would make a hearty home.

Halleroed Usm Shanghai Showroom Photo Jonathan Leijonhufvud Yellowtrace 09

Halleroed Usm Shanghai Showroom Photo Jonathan Leijonhufvud Yellowtrace 14

The colour palette is tonal and autumnal, with toasty terracotta tiles, creamy limestone walls and soft sisal carpets, resulting in the perfect contrasting backdrop for the precision of the USM furniture systems. Replete with a kitchen and dining room, the ground floor boasts limestone wall cladding in the entry and kitchen, balanced with square pastel pink tiles on the walls and paved by the aforementioned terracotta flooring. When combined with the retro red of the USM trolley and the glass and chrome shelves, the result is almost modernist, with the patina of a time gone by and a home well and truly in use.

Connecting the two floors is a sensational, sculptural spiral staircase made up of sisal carpet steps that lead you into the living room and library, a triangular space kitted out in chrome and Yves Klein Blue shelving by USM. Here, the timber cladding features once more, and embedded within, an ox bloodstone fireplace that is red hot in its elevation and modernisation of the space.

Halleroed Usm Shanghai Showroom Photo Jonathan Leijonhufvud Yellowtrace 15

Halleroed Usm Shanghai Showroom Photo Jonathan Leijonhufvud Yellowtrace 17

Non-USM furniture pieces to the likes of Scandinavian Wegner chairs, Italian Azucena armchairs designed by Luigi Caccia Dominioni, and Halleroed’s very own design for Figura, a stainless steel and black leather bench, feature as well. In the library, the constraints of the existing space are highlighted by the awkward shape of the room, however, Halleroed have cleverly worked around it and leaned into the often non-perfect layouts evident in any dense, apartment living situation. Adjacent, the chromed edge of the staircase ties in beautifully with the structural framework of the USM shelves across the two levels.

Halleroed’s aspirational faux-apartment becomes a brilliant backdrop of soft landings for the minimal yet cool USM furniture pieces, highlighting just how effective it can be to juxtapose the linearity of USM with the organic nature of the material selection to create a home that any client would dream of realising.