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    Space-age design informs Nodaleto shoe store by Rafael de Cárdenas

    French shoe brand Nodaleto has chosen Miami as the location of its first US store, which New York studio Rafael de Cárdenas designed with sci-fi-influenced red and chrome interiors.

    The shop opened in Miami Design District during the city’s art week earlier this month, starting a two-year lease in the 1,000-square-metre space (10,764 feet).
    Sculptural red seats run through the middle of the Nodaleto storeRafael de Cárdenas based the interior on mid-century French design, as a homage to the influence this movement had on sets created for sci-fi movies.
    The studio also linked the shape of Nodaleto’s signature heels to chairs featured in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
    The interiors pay homage to midcentury French design and space-age movie sets”The design, driven by the concept of ‘hyper-modern hospitality’, explores shapes and materials that echo the feel of a space station as well as an idea of a glamorous future,” said the Rafael de Cárdenas team.

    “In many ways, midcentury French design defined the frontier of space as much as NASA; the interior reflects that.”
    Shoes are displayed on white shelves in front of brushed chrome panelsSci-fi references can be seen across the store, which is fully carpeted in bright red and features brushed chrome panels divided by thin light strips along its walls.
    “In cinematographic style, a warm satin velvet floor meets cold steel shelves,” the studio said. “The store space – in line with brand’s creative tone – strives to induce the experience of contemporary luxury.”
    The shape of Nodaleto’s signature heel reminded Rafael de Cárdenas of the seats in 2001: A Space OdysseyShoe displays run the length of the narrow space, with white shelves suspended in front of the metallic panels.
    Through the middle are a series of sculptural, undulating modular seats for shoppers to sit and try on the footwear.

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    A large red volume right at the centre is emblazoned with the brand’s backlit logo, as well as three pairs of white mannequin legs that emerge from the vertical surface.
    “The store serves as a moldable creative field for the brand and strives to offer an intimate immersion into Nodaleto’s mischievous personality,” said the studio.
    White mannequin legs emerge from a wall under the Nodaleto logoRafael de Cárdenas was shortlisted for interior design studio of the year at the Dezeen Awards 2022. Named after its founder, the studio’s previous projects include a bar inside New York’s Nordstrom department store and the Manhattan offices of beauty brand Glossier.
    Miami Design District is home to the stores of many luxury brands, with architecture and interiors by internationally renowned studios, including Louis Vuitton’s menswear store wrapped in a diamond-patterned facade by Marcel Wanders.
    The brand’s first US store is located in Miami Design DistrictThe city, seen by some as the capital of Latin America, received an influx of creative talent during the Covid-19 pandemic and continues to grow as a cultural destination.
    “Nodaleto chooses Miami because it’s a crossroad of cultures, a city permanently kissed by the sun, a hub for arts and design, because of its daring nerve and unapologetic energy,” said the studio.
    Also during this year’s Miami Art Week, Kelly Wearstler debuted a collection of knotted marble furniture and Nike showcased hundreds of Virgil Abloh-designed sneakers.
    The photography is by Kris Tamburello.

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    Sarah Coleman puts a psychedelic twist on the brand's logo at the Fendi Caffe

    Artist Sarah Coleman has added a psychedelic twist to Fendi’s distinctive double-F logo for a pop-up cafe she designed for the brand in the Miami Design District.

    Stylised as the Fendi Caffe, the cafe designed for the Italian fashion house was located on the outdoor corridor of OTL restaurant in the heart of Miami’s Design District from May to early July.

    Coleman manipulated the traditional Fendi logoThe cafe was informed by the brand’s Summer Vertigo capsule collection, which New York artist Sarah Coleman designed in collaboration with Fendi’s creative director Silvia Venturini Fendi.
    Defined by yellow and blue tones, the ready-to-wear collection features 90s streetwear references as well as shapes borrowed from 70s psychedelia.
    The entrance to the cafe was on an outdoor corridorCentral to the cafe’s bold design was FF Vertigo, Fendi’s iconic FF logo that Coleman and Venturini Fendi warped for the capsule collection and repeated throughout the cafe in a series of bold colours.
    The artist explained the influences that prompted her to explore the 70s in her design process.

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    “When I first began brainstorming, I went straight to my bookshelf and dove into everything I have about the 1970s, a period of spontaneity and extreme self-expression,” Coleman told Dezeen.
    “I think the 70s are the greatest fashion era of the 20th century. The spirit of disco, the flowing post-psychedelic art,” she added. “There were so many inspiring aesthetic references to draw upon.”
    FF Vertigo was repeated throughout the spaceVisitors to the cafe were greeted with an expanse of bright yellow canopy that contrasted with green potted plants lining the permanent Fendi boutique that is located opposite the pop-up’s site.
    FF Vertigo featured as a bold motif throughout, topping the space’s various tables and barstools while more abstract swirly shapes tumbled over the cafe’s yellow walls.
    A permanent Fendi boutique is opposite where the pop-up wasOrb-style pendant lights and menus also included FF Vertigo in their design, while a more traditional version of the Fendi logo featured on the cafe’s edible items such as cappuccinos and toast.
    Fendi is a luxury fashion house founded in 1925 by Adele and Edoardo Fendi.
    Other previous projects by the brand that are informed by the past include a travelling installation for an edition of Design Miami featuring pastel 50s furniture.
    The images are courtesy of Fendi.

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  • Virgil Abloh and AMO design flexible flagship Off-White store in Miami that “can host a runway show”

    Fashion designer Virgil Abloh and AMO director Samir Bantal have designed the Off-White flagship store in Miami Design District to be a fulfilment centre and a multipurpose events space. Abloh, who owns the brand Off-White, and Bantal, director of architecture firm OMA’s research arm AMO, designed the store to rethink how physical shops should operate amid the growing popularity of digital shopping.

    “We’re niche entities, AMO, Off-White, Samir and myself, so we’re able to sort of wear our heart on our sleeve or our brain on our sleeve,” Abloh told Dezeen. “The first slide that Samir sent for the development was like, is shopping relevant?”

    “If we’re able to kind of fulfil our needs by ordering a lot of things online, what’s the role of a physical store?,” Bantal added.

    The idea is that the store is flexible, according to Abloh, who citied the annual Art Basel and Design Miami events that take place in Miami as examples of when it could be used to host a variety of activities, like art and music events, and talks.
    “There might be 1,000 people, you know, in key moments of that year where the shop can host a runway show, it can host a talk, it can host a cafe,” Abloh said.
    “It’ll be a cafe that extends out into the street, it’ll be what the environment needs it to be rather than the betting on, hey, this square footage needs to be used for retail 24 seven,” he added.
    “Who knows, by the time it opens I might turn it into like an Uber delivery of Off-White – that’s the freedom and the fun.”

    In response, the store is stripped back to only provide storage space for apparel on sale so it could easily be used for a variety of activities and cultural events.
    “We played with the idea of translating the store into a fulfilment center,” Bantal explained. “Fulfillment of not only the monetary transaction you do by buying a product, but also fulfilment in terms of like the engagement you have with a brand, or the aura of a brand.”
    “This, of course, being in Miami Design District led to the idea of creating a space that is adjustable and transformable over time,” Bantal continued. “We should be able to kind of compress the retail parts to almost like a storage element in the store, and open the store to a kind of variety of cultural events.”

    Located at 127 NE 41 Street, the two-storey store is fronted with an opaque polycarbonate wall on the ground floor that can be pushed back, squeezing the storage of the apparel to the rear and opening the front to the street.
    “You almost push everything that is retail and compress it in the space behind and then of course, ultimately it ends up in storage,” said Bantal. “While the space in front of that facade is completely open and free and can be used for any function.”
    Above the moveable wall is the word Shop with a red cross in front – a tongue-in-cheek nod to the concept behind the project.
    “This is the first Off White store to have a facade you know, that street level so the expression, the signage, you know, as the words Shop is a shop, but then has like, an X through the middle, and it’s very, like monolithic,” said Abloh. “The face of the concept is expressed on the facade.”

    Inside, the team aimed to continue to the theme of the fulfilment centre through a stripped-back industrial aesthetic – including floors rendered in lightly stained concrete, walls lined in corrugated metal and mesh ceiling panels.
    Off-White apparel will be displayed on either stainless steel shelving or black marquina and white Carrara marble rails. All the furniture is placed on wheels or is collapsible so it can be moved about to accommodate events.
    The pared-back style acts as a backdrop to a series of artworks that will be installed in the store and the bold electric blue stair that leads to the first floor. On this level, the brand intends to host more intimate events like dinner parties.

    Abloh, who is also the artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear collection, founded his Off-White brand as a ready-to-wear streetwear label in 2012. He previously teamed up with Bantal to design Figures of Speech, a retrospective exhibition of his career at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA).
    The store joins a number of fashion flagships in Miami Design District, which Craig Robins transformed from a formerly neglected area into the hub for design boutiques, luxury fashion brands and art galleries.
    Others include Joseph, which London firm Sybarite design with a spiral black staircase, Christian Louboutin, which is covered in tree bark, Dior, which has a boutique sheathed in curved white concrete panels, and Tom Ford, which is housed in a pleated concrete shop designed by ArandaLasch.

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  • Black staircase twists up Joseph store in Miami Design District

    London studio Sybarite has designed a store for fashion label Joseph in the Miami Design District to include round balconies, curved railings spiral stairs as a reference to the city’s seaside architecture. A black metal corkscrew staircase is among the details that takes cues from Miami’s seaside architecture dating back to the 1940s and 50s.

    Featuring contrasting white polished-marble stair treads, it twists through a circular opening to lead from womenswear on the ground floor to menswear and accessories on the first floor.

    Smoked-black glass wraps around the opening with a curved black balustrade adding to the decorative motifs. Sybarite said other details include the irregular wall cutouts that form windows.

    Marking the fashion label’s largest store to date, the 243-square-metre Miami Design District space is among a number the British studio has designed for the fashion label.
    In each, Sybarite follows the theme of opposites common in Joseph apparel with contrasting tones of black and white, and harsh and soft materials.

    “Our designs for Joseph are based on opposites and the unexpected to provide a complete brand experience for the customer,” said Sybarite co-founder Simon Mitchell.
    White-painted walls and concrete floors are a backdrop to black metalwork fitted with LED lighting that forms frames around clothing rails and extends up in an angular form to meet the ceiling.

    Plinths for bags and shoes made from oriented-strand board (OSB), brass and Corian are arranged in groups on an area of the ground floor marked by a brass grid embedded in the concrete floor.

    Tree bark covers Christian Louboutin boutique in Miami Design District

    A pop of colour is provided by the till desk made of Italian green marble, following on from a recurring concept in Jospeph stores in which a different marble from around the world is used.

    Sybarite has also used geometric shapes of softer carpeting, as and rich shearlings and velvet upholstery in the changing rooms, to add a more cosy elements.

    The studio completed the Joseph store in 2018 making the latest addition to the Miami Design District, which property developer Craig Robins transformed from a formerly neglected area into the hub for design boutiques, luxury fashion brands and art galleries.

    Other fashion brands that have opened up architecturally interesting shops in the area include Christian Louboutin, which has a flagship store covered in tree bark, Dior, which has a boutique sheathed in curved white concrete panels, and Tom Ford, which is housed in a pleated concrete shop designed by ArandaLasch.
    Founded in 2002, Sybarite has completed a number of retail and hospitality interiors, including shops for fashion houses Alberta Ferretti and Marni.

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