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Architecture firm Snøhetta has created a library-informed respite from the digital world with A Better Place to Think, an Oslo pop-up shop for tablet brand reMarkable. More
Vibrant green walls surround a chunky rammed-earth counter in this garden-themed pop-up shop in LA that creatives Alex Reed and Dutra Brown have designed for lifestyle brand Flamingo Estate.Flamingo Estate’s Harvest Shop pop-up takes over a retail unit in Platform, a high-end shopping centre in LA’s Culver City area.
The shop offers an array of the brand’s holistic products for the body and home, along with its range of pantry foods, which includes items such as extra-virgin olive oil, honey and dark chocolate.
Many products are made with ingredients grown on the grounds of Flamingo Estate, which is tucked away in the hills of the nearby Eagle Rock neighbourhood. Its sprawling garden is host to 150 different species of flowering plants and shrubs, as well as a fruit orchard, vegetable beds and a hive of bees.
A rammed-earth counter sits at the centre of Harvest Shop
This lush landscape became a key point of reference for the pop-up’s designers, locally-based creatives Alex Reed and Dutra Brown.
Together they sought to fashion a space that resembled “a small, secret corner of the estate itself…as if it was lifted from the earth and brought to the store”.
An abstract sculpture perches on one end of the counter
At the centre of the shop is a monolithic counter crafted from rammed earth. The bottom of the counter is inset with different-coloured fragments of stone, while the top features a cluster of white-tile blocks and platforms on which products are presented.
To ensure the tiles could be used again post pop-up, a simple mixture of mud and earth was used as grout.
A corner of the counter is dominated by an amorphous sculpture that Reed and Brown created using scagliola – a type of plaster typically made from gypsum, glue and pigments.
A mural depicting trees and rolling hills acts as a backdrop to the counter
“For Flamingo Estate’s first physical location, we looked to the company’s ‘hands-in-the dirt’ ideals of what is luxurious and covetable today,” the pair said.
“We’ve utilized our respective expertise to design and build a project centred around materiality – this collage of organic material and sculptural form, together with provenance and fantasy, celebrates what we love about Flamingo Estate.”
Frida Escobedo segments Aesop Park Slope with rammed-earth brickwork
The garden theme continues onto Harvest Shop’s walls, where LA-based artist Abel Macias has painted a rich, green mural.
“Richard [Christiansen, owner of Flamingo Estate] and I talked about a concept based around Snow White, the enchanted little forest that she lives in that’s sort of dark but very magical and green in a way,” explained Macias.
“We came up with this landscape that’s rolling hills and swirly trees, keeping everything in the tonal green world so that it feels verdant and very lush [in the store].”
Emerald-coloured paint covers a wall on the opposite side of the shop, which is mounted with rows of glass jars filled with various natural ingredients.
Another wall is mounted with rows of glass jars
Flamingo Estate is overseen by creative director Richard Christiansen. Beyond the estate’s garden lies a Spanish colonial-style house that, since the beginning of 2020, has operated as a chic retreat for creative people in Los Angeles.
Its Harvest Shop pop-up isn’t the only retail project to have made use of rammed earth. Last year, Mexican architect Frida Escobedo applied rammed-earth bricks to the walls of an Aesop store in Brooklyn, New York, to emulate the facade of the brownstone townhouses seen around the area.
Photography is by Adrian Gaut.
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A chunky, wedge-shaped island crafted from plaster and beeswax anchors the sparse interior of this pop-up library, shop and exhibition space that design studio Pattern has created in Canberra.The temporary library is situated in the trendy suburb of Braddon and belongs to new Australian wellness brand Adytum, which produces eco-conscious self-care products such as teas, face oils and bath soaks.
Adytum Library is anchored by a huge island
Although the brand is set to open the doors to its first spa in 2021, it was keen to conceive a slightly different style of wellness space that instead celebrates books and the “intellectual nourishment one receives from the written word”.
Sydney-based studio Pattern – which is also developing the interiors of Adytum’s spa – was asked to design the library. The brand’s key request was that the pop-up had minimal environmental impact.
Books and products from Adytum are displayed across the island
With this in mind, Pattern ditched the idea of overhauling the entire retail unit and instead created just one striking element – a huge wedge-shaped island that sits at the centre of the floor plan, built around two existing structural columns.
“While we didn’t have a tenancy of cathedral-like proportions to work with, we drew inspiration from the concepts of purity, simplicity, and clarity often found in religious architectural spaces,” Pattern’s co-founder, Lily Goodwin, told Dezeen.
Incense is burned in the pop-up throughout the day
The island, which gradually tapers off to a narrow point, has a reclaimed MDF frame that’s been covered with natural plaster and finished with a coating of beeswax.
Pattern completes understated interiors for Locura bar in Byron Bay
An array of design, architecture and art titles are displayed across the surface, which can be purchased by visitors or borrowed via Adytum’s membership scheme. The books are softly illuminated by a couple of white table lamps by Danish brand Hay which have been dotted across the island.
There is also a handful of Adytum’s products, including incense sticks that will be burnt throughout the day.
Adytum Library also exhibits work by Australian artists
The outer periphery of Adytum Library is used to display works from Australian artists Traianos Pakioufakis and Alana Wilson.
Pakioufakis’s expansive photographic prints are draped across bent copper pipes that were found in construction site waste, while Wilson’s collection of ceramic vessels – which have been darkened with metal-oxide glazes – perch on rough plinths that the studio salvaged from a local stonemason.
Artworks are displayed on stone plinths or copper pipes
Pattern was established in 2016 by Lily Goodwin and Josh Cain. Previous projects by the studio include Locura, a cocktail and small-plates bar in Byron Bay that’s meant to evoke the “raw beauty” of late-night eateries in Mexico.
It also created rose-tinted interiors for The Daily Edited, an accessories shop in Melbourne.
Photography is by Traianos Pakioufakis.
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