Fangsuo Commune (方所)

Fangsuo Commune's Chengdu store sits below the Taikoo Li quarter beside the Daci Temple, its concrete, temple-inspired interior threading reading galleries through a coffee bar and a curated range of homeware and apparel. The Chengdu shop is one node in a wider network -- Guangzhou, Qingdao, Xi'an, Sanya and a Shanghai location among them -- run by Guangdong Fangsuo Cultural Investment Development Co., a company whose ambitions extend past bookselling into publishing culture itself: it organizes the International Bookstore Forum and partners with the Fu Lei Translation Publishing Award, an established prize for literature translated into Chinese. The company has also pushed into adjacent cultural real estate, including reading-themed boutique hotel concepts and rural cultural initiatives, treating the bookstore less as a single retail format than as the visible storefront of a broader publishing-and-culture business. Inside the Chengdu store itself, the emphasis stays on the reading experience -- galleries built to be walked through rather than shelved for browsing, with the coffee bar and lifestyle goods positioned as a stop along that route rather than the main event.