Imagine Gaetano Pesce’s voluptuous Up 5 chair inflated to environmental scale, or perhaps one of Verner Panton’s interior landscapes morphed into a celestial pleasure dome. Although the Venus Lounge may nod to a variety of avant-garde designs of yesteryear, its conception and execution are tethered closely to the here and now. Architect Adam Sokol of Los Angeles–based firm asap/ conjured the eccentric parlor as the latest addition to X-House, a hybrid business/residential entertaining space designed for an entrepreneur in Beijing. “It’s a place for interactions that you couldn’t have in, say, a restaurant,” Sokol explains. “It’s the kind of space where people feel out of their comfort zone psychologically, so you get a different result socially.” The upholstered component of the room was fabricated in 54 pieces at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York. “We began with the idea of placing people in different seating positions. It was about creating possibilities,” the architect says. The otherworldly ambience is buoyed by a massive photogravure of the planet Venus, created with artist Paul Taylor of New Hampshire’s Renaissance Press. A cosmography of pinspots and fiber-optic lighting, derived from a map of the stars visible from this location, furthers the fantasy. This may not be the final frontier of business entertaining, but it certainly moves the needle.