A colour scheme informed by soil and moss features inside this showroom in Antwerp, Belgium, which Yakusha Design has developed for its own furniture line Faina.
The retail space, named Faina Gallery, is set inside a 500-year-old building.
As a result, the studio steered away from making major structural alterations to avoid disturbing its historic framework.
Instead, the Ukrainian studio devised a new colour palette, painting walls throughout the shop in earthy shades that evoke the natural world.
“I wanted to convey this feeling of grounding serenity in the interior,” explained Victoria Yakusha, who founded both Yakusha Design and Faina.
“Nothing is more powerful than the energy of earth. When standing on bare earth, I am one with nature, I gain strength.”
Upon entering Faina Gallery, visitors walk into a room almost entirely washed with a deep, mossy green paint.
The only surfaces untouched by the colour are the grey terrazzo floors and the ceiling, which has been left in its original state.
Matching green furnishings are displayed throughout the space, including Faina’s angular Toptun armchairs and three of its knobbly hand-sculpted Soniah floor lamps.
There is also a beige edition of the Plyn sofa, with its gently curving cushions stacked on top of each other “like stones that have been naturally polished by wild waters”.
A bespoke stainless steel shelving unit runs the length of one of the walls.
Designed to resemble a cabinet of curiosities, it showcases an array of Faina’s ceramic ornaments alongside a number of scents for the home.
The storage unit is interrupted by a steel-lined doorway that leads through to Faina Gallery’s second room.
This space has been painted jet-black in a nod to chernozem, a highly fertile black soil that is found in abundance throughout Ukraine.
The furniture presented here is dark, too. One corner of the room is dominated by a black version of Faina’s hole-punctured Ztista table while a charcoal-grey model of the brand’s bulbous Domna chair sits nearby.
There’s also a wall-mounted black tapestry emblazoned with the word “earth”, written in the symbol-based writing system of the ancient Cucuteni-Trypillia civilisation, which lived in Ukraine in the fifth millennium BC.
Victoria Yakusha established her eponymous studio in 2006 before launching Faina in 2014.
Her practice has previously designed a number of interiors in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, including Yakusha Design’s own office and a calm, tactile fast food restaurant.
The photography is by Piet-Albert Goethals.
Source: Rooms - dezeen.com
