The newest of China’s surreal mirrored bookstores is now open in Chongqing, offering a disorienting, Escher-like experience to all who enter. Designed by X+Living, the Chongqing Zhongshuge Bookstore leads visitors through an unassuming glass facade on the third floor of Zodi Plaza and into a reflective maze full of reading materials waiting to be discovered.

Within the lobby is an arrangement of lampshade-shaped bookshelves that curve around illuminated reading spaces, their mirror images on the ceiling making them look much taller than they really are. “The bookshelves reflect on the ground and form a tunnel of books that beckons visitors to follow it deeper into space and knowledge,” says X+Living.

Further down the hallway, a “ladder hall” offers three levels of bookshelves accessed by branching staircases. The mirrors make it difficult to tell where the real shelves end and the reflections begin, but the space would be marvelous even without them. An adjacent children’s room is brighter in color, but similarly disorienting.

“Up to the 4th floor from the ‘ladder hall”’is a leisure area, where visitors can enjoy the aroma of coffee or a taste of good tea and immerse themselves into a tranquil world of different stories by reading. The ‘lampshade-shaped bookshelves’ around create scattered booths at this area, in which visitors may gather with friends to have fun reading and enjoy their leisure time. Connected to the leisure area is the extensive reading hall, where works of great minds are listed and visitors are able to broaden their eyes and enrich their spiritual world.”

Previously, the same studio designed floor-to-ceiling curved and mirrored bookshelves at the Yangzhou Zhongshuge bookshop, creating the effect of a tunnel of books. Check it out here.

A maze of staircases leads absolutely nowhere within a series of new hotel rooms at ‘The Other Place’ in China, nodding to artist MC Escher’s famous lithograph print entitled ‘Relativity.’ Shenzhen-based architecture firm Studio10 renovated the existing rooms at ‘The Other Place’ guesthouse in Guilin, giving half the rooms a ‘maze’ theme with deep forest green walls and the other half a ‘dream’ theme in soft pink and white.

The surreal staircases stretch up the walls, taking advantage of the impressive ceiling height. Occasionally, there really is something at the end of them – a door, or a loft – though even the doors aren’t quite what they seem. Others just contribute to the graphic nature of the design, their undersides stepped as well to add to the optical illusions. The architects envision the design as a seamless transition from 2D to 3D.

“All components from the reality world such as lighting fixtures and electronic appliances have been concealed behind a series of black-painted doors, maintaining the pristine, chimerical nature of the space,” they say of the pink “dream” rooms.

“In the other forest-green-themed room, anti-gravitational stairs lead to golden doors, behind which there could be a trail leading to a secret forest – or some other unexpected findings that surprises you.”

While no physical space can quite capture the strange, vertigo-inducing spatial confusion of Escher’s drawing, ‘The Other Place’ definitely honors the original in a way that’s instantly recognizable (and also evocative of La Muralla Roja by Ricardo Bofill.)