The Louis Shanghai: Booking, Timed Slots and the LV Café

The Louis Shanghai is a 114.5-metre ship built from Louis Vuitton trunks, sitting on a plaza in Jing'an since June 2025 and open to anyone with a free timed slot. Three decks hold eight exhibition rooms, a boutique of city-exclusive pieces, and a café that is harder to book than the exhibition itself. An hour covers the visit comfortably. What follows covers what is on each deck, how to reserve without WeChat, and what the menu costs in Canadian dollars.

hat is the Louis Vuitton Ship in Shanghai?

Louis Vuitton calls it a cultural space, Shanghai calls it the boat, and a map app wants 路易号. The structure is a three-storey pavilion built to read as a liner at dock, with a hull of monogrammed trunks and a deck plan that stacks exhibition, retail and food in that order from the ground up. Shohei Shigematsu of OMA designed it, and the whole thing covers roughly 1,600 square metres, which is compact enough to see properly in an hour.

Nothing about it is permanent in the way a museum is permanent. It was built as a limited-run project, with reports at opening putting its lifespan at about two years, and Louis Vuitton has not published a closing date. As of autumn 2026 it is open, busy, and booked out most weekends, which is one more reason to see it while it is here.

Doors open at 10:00 and close at 22:00, seven days a week. The exhibition takes the lower two decks. The café takes the top one and stops seating well before the building shuts.

Finding the Ship in Jing'an

A ship parked in Jing'an is not difficult to find. The Louis takes up HKRI Taikoo Hui's southern plaza — the mall complex whose street address is 南京西路789号, or 789 Nanjing West Road — a short walk from the Wujiang Road side. You will see the hull before you see the address.

The closest stop is 南京西路站, West Nanjing Road, where Line 2, Line 12 and Line 13 meet. Come up at Exit 5 on the Line 13 side and the bow is directly ahead; Exit 6 puts you about 200 metres off, across the square, which only matters in rain. Coming from the riverside Bund, or from the east end of Nanjing Road, Line 2 covers it in two stops westward.

From Pudong International, Line 2 is the cheap route and takes a little over an hour including the change at Guanglan Road; a taxi runs 50 to 90 minutes depending on traffic. Hongqiao is closer, roughly 35 minutes on the same line. In a taxi, show the driver 兴业太古汇 rather than an English address, or say 南京西路789号 and point at the ship when you see it.

Inside Visionary Journeys

The exhibition fills 1,200 square metres of the lower decks with just over 140 pieces, arranged across eight themed spaces. There is no route worth memorizing. It runs one way, bottom to top, and ends at the checkout.

Trunkscape, and the Crowd It Attracts

The first room is Trunkscape: an arch built from eighty monogram trunks, mirrored down both sides, with a lit sky overhead that makes the corridor read as endless. It is the most photographed point in the building, and the first ten minutes of any slot bunch up here. Take the picture, then keep going: the rooms behind it are quieter, and the exhibition keeps building from there.

Origins, Voyage and the Workshop Floor

The heritage rooms do the historical work. Origins reconstructs the Asnières workshop of 1859 and the hard-sided trunks that started the business, including a Gris Trianon trunk and the wardrobe cases that travelled by sea. Voyage follows the shipping lines outward. The Workshop is live: artisans stitch leather at benches while a machine works a trunk through a durability test, and you can hear the hammering from the corridor.

Sport, Fashion and the Perfume Wall

Sport is a red corridor of trophy trunks, Formula 1 and Olympic pieces among them, lit like a tunnel into a stadium. Fashion runs through the artistic directors — Marc Jacobs, Virgil Abloh, Pharrell Williams — one room, several eras, no chronology to follow. Perfume holds bottles going back to 1927, kept behind glass as archive pieces.

Hemingway's Trunk and the Boutique

The book room is the quiet one and the reason to slow down: a library trunk made for Ernest Hemingway, a typewriter, and a first edition of A Moveable Feast. The boutique comes last, built into the exit route, with city-exclusive stock and a hot-stamp desk where purchases can be personalized with the ship's profile or a Shanghai skyline. Near the exit, a smaller counter carries the affordable end of the range: city guides, card holders, small leather goods.

How to Book a Free Slot at The Louis Shanghai

Entry is free and every visitor still needs a time. Slots run in one-hour blocks, released ahead of the date, and weekends go first. The reservation is tied to a passport rather than to a name typed into a form.

Booking Through WeChat

Most people book inside WeChat. Search for 我的专属LV — the English label is My LV — then find Visionary Journeys, select the Shanghai building, and choose a date plus a one-hour window. Enter your details exactly as your passport prints them. The app then issues a QR code, which is what the staff scan.

If You Do Not Have WeChat

Visitors without a WeChat account can use the brand's English registration page for the show. It collects an email and your passport information, then sends the entry code by email. This is the route most overseas visitors end up on, and it works; confirmations usually arrive within minutes. The form is quicker on a laptop than on a phone.

There is also a registration desk on the plaza at the bow, behind the outdoor escalator, with codes for both systems. It exists for people who arrive unbooked. It is a fallback rather than a plan; a slot booked from home is the shorter route in.

What to Bring on the Day

• The passport you travelled on; staff match the number and the name on it to the booking.
• The code open in the app. A screenshot may be refused.
• Ten minutes of slack, because even a booked slot means a short line at the gangway.
• Nothing for under-14s, who come in on an accompanying adult's booking.

For weekends and public holidays, reserve two or three days in advance. On weekdays, slots often survive into the same morning, which is the single biggest scheduling advantage you have.

Dining at Le Café Louis Vuitton

One deck up, Le Café Louis Vuitton is the city's first Louis Vuitton café and the only part of the building with a bill. (The group's earlier Chinese dining room, The Hall in Chengdu, is a restaurant rather than a café.) The room is small, the terrace looks back over the plaza, and the kitchen works in French with local edits: monogram-stamped pasta and dumplings, a lobster roll, fish under a bergamot sabayon, a Caesar dressed with yuzu, duck croque monsieur, and a chocolate monogram to finish. Leonardo Zambrino, who oversees Louis Vuitton's restaurant projects in China, runs the kitchen; Zoe Zhou handles pastry.

Seatings and What It Costs

Service runs in three sittings — lunch 11:30–13:30, afternoon tea 14:30–16:00, dinner 17:30–20:30 — and the room turns over completely between them.

Figures are converted at about ¥4.76 to C$1 and shift with the exchange rate. A service charge goes on top of the bill, and the deposit comes off it rather than being charged twice.

Getting a Table

Café reservations are separate from exhibition reservations, and they are the ones to plan around: slots are released in batches, sometimes at short notice, and the best sittings go quickly. If the café is the point of the trip, book it first and build the exhibition slot around it. Afternoon tea fills fastest, partly because it is the sitting everybody photographs.

What to See Near The Louis Shanghai

Zhang Yuan (张园) is the closest thing to a second attraction: a block of restored stone-gate lane houses, now boutiques and coffee, five minutes from the plaza on foot. The two pair naturally in a single morning.

Practical Notes for Visiting Louis Vuitton Ship Shanghai

• Two bookings, not one. The exhibition and the café are separate systems, and the café is the bottleneck.
• Take the first slot of the day midweek if you want Trunkscape to yourself. A 10:00 booking lands around dinner time the previous evening in Vancouver, so an early start feels easier than it should.
• Set aside three-quarters of an hour to an hour for the exhibition, or two hours if you add the boutique and a meal.
• Know the café's numbers before you book tea: the set price excludes service, and the deposit is credited rather than extra.
• Carry your passport. The booking is checked against it at the door, not at a ticket window.
• Keep strollers outside. The halls are tight; a carrier is easier than a stroller.
• Re-check the booking page before you fly. This is a temporary structure, and hours and booking rules can change with the season.

A Half-Day That Fits

If Shanghai gives you one free morning, take the earliest exhibition slot, walk the eight rooms in under an hour, cross to Zhang Yuan for coffee, and finish at the temple. Add the café only if you are willing to plan the rest of the day around a 14:30 sitting. A Jing'an hotel puts the whole loop within a short walk.

The exit puts you back on the plaza through the boutique, and by mid-afternoon there is usually a second crowd at the bow, photographing the hull in better light. None of them need a booking, which is the argument for claiming a slot early rather than leaving it to the last morning: the exhibition is the part of the ship you cannot see from outside. Pick the hour you want, keep the passport handy, and the visit looks after itself.

Find Stays in Jing'an District/West Nanjing Road