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

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      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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      Folding polycarbonate wall reveals earthy interiors of São Paulo wellness space Dois Trópicos

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      Brazilian studio MNMA has designed a spiral concrete stair and folding polycarbonate doors in this botanical store, yoga classroom and restaurant in São Paulo.Dois Trópicos has a calming earthy palette featuring local materials and crafts that MNMA chose to complement the functions of the wellness hub.

      “The concept of the project is a hybrid space, there is no determination or boundaries. We want a space that integrates gastronomy, the practice of yoga and botany,” MNMA explained. “Where people can feel in every way the importance of spending time in the chaotic city of Sao Paulo to take care of themselves, slowly and with pleasure.”

      “A commercial space that creates a homelike hosting experience, using nostalgia and natural matter, crafted by artisan hands that desire to achieve not perfection but real environments,” it added.

      Translucent polycarbonate doors set in aluminium frames front the exterior to contrast the earthy aesthetic, and allow natural light and cross-ventilation.
      “By contrast, the facade is technological, drafted and executed with precision, thought to allow sun and wind in, to avoid artificial air conditioning systems,” the studio explained.

      “The general purpose is to create a contemporary element that, when opened, would bring back some lost time of ancient forms of construction, a slow passing of time, an earthy place… it feels like ‘home’.” the studio continued.

      Slender terracotta-coloured bricks made by local craftsmen cover the flooring and form structures for washbasins, while textured soil-based render is applied by hand to the walls throughout.

      “We don’t use conventional paint to colour the walls, we literally use earth (like clay) to give this colour, the walls and ceilings are natural earth colours, we don’t use anything chemical,” MNMA said.

      Cracked floors and weathered wood feature in minimal São Paulo shoe store

      “The soil reacts allegorically to the sunlight movement along the day, turning walls, ceilings and the floor not into limits or boundaries, but into canvases for the light to express itself gradually in various forms,” it added. “As it is possible to enjoy comfortably great and authentic food, full of flavours.”

      A spiral staircase at the entrance has a rendered banister and concrete treads with a marked underside that was built using leftover wood on the construction site. It leads up to an open studio space for yoga and massages.
      “The shape was made with materials reused from demolition,” it explained. “The experience was more important than the performance of the technique, so the drawings that are usually super strict gave voice to the empiricism of the local artisans workers,” the studio added.

      A circular door punctured in the rear wall to provides access to stairs that lead down to a restaurant on the lower level. Granite gravel is laid the floor of the outdoor areas to allow for drainage of water. A glazed roof partially covers the restaurant and bar – which is also made from the pale bricks.
      Founded by André Pepato and Mariana Schmidt, MNMA has used a similarly pared-back aesthetic for a number of spaces in São Paulo. They include a retail space for Brazilian women’s clothing store Egrey and a store for shoe company Selo.
      Photography is by Andre Klotz.

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      Black staircase twists up Joseph store in Miami Design District

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      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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      Collective installs stage in New York ONS Clothing store

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      Architecture firm Collective has inserted a stage with a green curtain for hosting events in the back of the ONS Clothing store in New York City.The flagship location of ONS, a menswear apparel brand, is located on 201 Mulberry Street in New York’s Nolita neighbourhood.
      It is located inside an existing structure situated 1.5 metres below street level that was previously a garage.

      ONS intends to use the stage space for hosting cultural events, such as exhibitions and pop-ups that it says will change regularly.

      Steel railings, ceramic tiles and asphalt flooring are among the references Collective has taken from the streetscape to guide the store’s design.
      To balance the dark colours and textures of the flooring the studio has inserted pops of colour using light blue tiles on the changing room pods and blue and green counter surfaces.

      “The material we used in the store were carefully chosen for the feeling of the street – ceramic tiles, steel ramps, fibre glass objects while their bright array of blue and green colours balance out the crudeness of the black asphalt and steel,” Collective said.
      Pale wood floors and wood panelling cover the walls in the front room of the store, which the studio conceived as a “standalone wooden box”. In the space there are two wood counters for displaying accessories, while rectangular cutouts in the walls to hold clothing racks.

      An asphalt ramp replaced the existing wheelchair lift to create an accessible pathway from the street into the storefront and to the rear of the space where the studio has constructed a large stage.

      Lunya styles Manhattan store like a “glitzy, upscale New York apartment”

      “The ramp allows a natural flow of circulation from a higher point entering the very deep area at the back of the store, and at the same time, its hovering presence performs as an object in space,” the studio added.

      There are several “props” on the stage including blue- and white-tiered shelving units, curved plinths for displaying products and potted plants, added as a decorative element.
      Angular green drapes attached to a steel rack on the white ceiling and wrap around the space to form an adjustable divider. When closed the fabric curtains extend 30 metres forming a backdrop for the retail displays.

      “Together with the rearrangement of the bright colour display props, the back room area of the ONS,” it continued.
      “Flagship is immediately domesticated and activated into a stage for events, with a light touch of living room like domesticity and comfort.”

      Collective is a studio that practices architecture, interiors and exhibition design founded in 2015.
      It is led by Betty Ng, Chi Yan Chan, Juan Minguez and Katja Lam and has offices in Hong Kong, Madrid, San Francisco and New York.

      Los Angeles clothing brand Lunya also has a retail space in Nolita that takes cues from “upscale New York” apartments, while other stores in the city include a jewellery store in SoHo.
      Photography is by Eric Petschek.

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      Burberry and Tencent collaborate on interactive WeChat shop in Shenzhen

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      Visitors to Shenzhen’s Burberry flagship store can use Tencent’s WeChat app to interact with the window display and play their own music in fitting rooms.The British fashion brand and China’s largest social media company collaborated to design a shop that suited Shenzhen’s growing reputation for technology.

      Shoppers use WeChat, a Chinese messaging and social media app, to engage with the shop in Shenzhen’s MixC development.

      Tencent and Burberry have produced a custom mini program that is unlocked via WeChat. Users create a profile and are given a digital avatar in the form of a cartoon fawn that hatches from an egg.

      Through the app, shoppers can book one of the three themed fitting rooms, pre-select the clothes and play their own music while they try them on. They can also use this program to book a table at the in-house cafe and make appointments with stylists and other services.
      To encourage engagement, the program has a rewards system to earn “social currency” that unlocks custom content, such as new characters and outfits for the animal avatar and exclusive dishes on the cafe menu.

      All the products have QR codes, which can be scanned to display more information and visual hints for styling the project – and give the user more points for unlocking content.
      The interactive window display is currently a sculptural recreation of the runway for Burberry’s Autumn Winter 2020 show. Mirrors and screens capture the movement of people as they interact with it, which users can capture and share with their phones.

      “Social media is an increasingly important part of the customer journey and the interaction between social media and physical surroundings is ever more seamless,” said Burberry senior vice president of digital Mark Morris.
      “Our social retail store in Shenzhen is our response to this. It is a space where the social and physical worlds merge, taking interactions from social media and bringing them into the physical retail environment,” he told Dezeen.
      “The tech we use in the store is intended to provide a seamless journey that augments customers’ online and instore life. Therefore, this is not a tech store, but a beautiful luxury store augmented by technology.”

      Burberry chief creative officer Riccardo Tisci turned to the brand’s archive to create a visual look for the themed rooms that correspond to the digital platform.

      Peter Saville collaborates with Riccardo Tisci to design new Burberry logo and monogram

      The Italian fashion designer used the Thomas Burberry Monogram and the fashion house’s fawn print as a recurring motif – the latter being the inspiration for the WeChat avatar too.

      Furnishings, fixtures and plinths throughout the store are made from plywood and mirrors. Tisci used a palette of beige, pistachio, pink and blue throughout the 10 rooms in the shop, each of which has a different theme.
      The three bookable fitting rooms are decorated around the concept of Burberry Animal Kingdom, Reflections and the Thomas Burberry Monogram, and visitors can book their favourite via the app.

      Thomas’ Cafe is decked out in high-gloss beige with chamfered mirrors, animal-patterned wall panels and layers of sandy-coloured curtains.
      Even the tabletops are mirrored, creating a unique backdrop for diners to capture their meal for sharing on social media.

      In the Trench Experience room, digital displays set in the plywood walls show moving images of nature in reference to the fashion brand’s founder, Thomas Burberry, who designed a waterproof trench coat for British troops in the first world war. This room has more opportunities for customers to unlock custom content.
      “I am fascinated by the balance between nature and technology, and the energy that connects the two,” said Tisci.
      “This store explores this relationship, blending the digital and the physical realms in an exciting new concept. I wanted to bring this love of the outdoors to life through all the elements of the store.”

      Burberry previously brought technology to its London shop, where it installed a robot that appeared to chisel sculptures out of polystyrene blocks.
      Tencent recently opened its new headquarters in Shenzhen, a pair of towers designed by NBBJ joined by multiple bridges to encourage staff to meet and interact.

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      New York hair salon Hawthorne Studio is designed for social distancing

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      Wooden frames, moveable styling stations and plants are used to encourage social distancing in this New York hair salon, which local studio BoND designed during the coronavirus pandemic. BoND, led by architecture duo Noam Dvir and Daniel Rauchwerger, began working on the design of Hawthorne Studio in January this year, just a few months before
      The post New York hair salon Hawthorne Studio is designed for social distancing appeared first on Dezeen. More

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      Forte Forte fashion boutique in Madrid is filled with shapely details

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      A pale geometric relief wall offsets brass and green-marble decor details in this Madrid boutique designed by creative duo Giada Forte and Robert Vattilana.Madrid’s Forte Forte store occupies a corner plot in Salamanca – a glamorous district of the city known for its boulevards lined with luxury fashion boutiques and upscale restaurants.

      It was designed by the brand’s co-founder, Giada Forte and her partner, art director Robert Vattilana.

      The pair devised opulent interiors for Forte Forte’s London, Milan, Tokyo and Paris stores, but wanted the new Madrid branch to have a more restrained aesthetic that still offered moments of “poetry and feminine delicacy”.

      “[The store] is charged with a sensual energy polarized on the offset of masculine and feminine, curves and angles, geometry and sentiment,” Forte and Vattilana explained.
      “There’s a recognizable grammar of surfaces, treatments, colors uniting the different spaces that’s born from our creative dialogue, but the narration takes on a different metric and tone.”

      An off-white relief wall that features a haphazard array of raised geometric shapes runs down one side of Forte Forte’s ground level.
      A structural column in the store has been given a similarly geometric form. It extends up through a circular opening in the ceiling that has been backlit to look as if natural light is beaming through from the outdoors.

      At the centre of the store is a low-lying semicircular bench perched on a mottled pink rug. The flooring that runs underneath has been inlaid with mismatch cuts of grooved and plain stone, as well as tiny triangles made from emerald-green Iranian marble.
      The same veiny marble has been used to make the store’s door handle and its rounded service counter.
      Directly above the counter, thin brass stems have been loosely arranged in a grid-like formation to form a hanging sculpture. It supports a handful of warped glass orbs.

      Heavy gold velvet curtains help screen-off the cylindrical changing booth that dominates the rear corner of the store.
      Brass doors punctuated by small portholes can be pulled back to grant access to the inside of the booth, where teal-blue carpet has been fitted to match the blue underside of the curtains.

      Fashion sits alongside found objects at the Forte Forte boutique in Milan

      Garments are hung from spindly brass rails, while accessories and lifestyle items are presented on a set of brass shelves held up by a pole that’s been made to resemble an oversized bolt.

      A curving blush-pink staircase leads up to the store’s second floor. Forte and Vattilana have used the expansive landing that sits between the staircase’s two flights of steps as an additional display area.
      It’s dressed with a huge leafy plant, another brass clothes rail and an organically-shaped mirror.

      Forte Forte opened its first brick-and-mortar store in 2018 – until then, the brand’s clothing could exclusively be purchased online.
      The inaugural store in Milan has been decorated with a curious array of found objects including a nude sketch, a lump of coral and a bust of the goddess Venus that came from an old French foundry.

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      Aesop's London store takes its colour from the red sandstone of Glamis Castle

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      Precast stone blocks coloured with red sandstone from Glamis Castle in Scotland form the walls of this refuge-style Aesop store that architecture studio Al-Jawad Pike has created in a west London shopping centre.The studio designed the small store for skincare brand Aesop to be a retreat from the bustling aisles of Westfield shopping centre in Sheperd’s Bush.
      “We wanted the store to be a refuge from the busy mall environment, it is a sort of building within a building – using genuine masonry construction rather than applied finishes or surfaces,” Al-Jawad Pike co-founder Jessam Al-Jawad told Dezeen.

      Al-Jawad Pike chose to build the walls of the store from precast stone blocks, which enclose the space and create a feeling akin to a walled garden. The curved form of the walls is also meant to reference the undulating brickwork of Uruguayan engineer Eladio Dieste.

      “The concept was to create a kind of walled garden within the mall,” said Al-Jawad.
      “It was inspired by the ‘crinkle crankle’ wall of the English countryside as well as the structures of Eladio Dieste, which both use an undulating waveform to give rigidity to a single skin of masonry.”

      Earthy tones have been applied throughout the store. Powder from the same red sandstone that was used to make the 17th-century Glamis Castle in Scotland has been used to colour the precast stone blocks.
      The resulting red blockwork walls, which were built using two standard shapes of precast blocks, have been paired with red concrete-tile flooring and a clay plaster ceiling.

      Frida Escobedo segments Aesop Park Slope with rammed-earth brickwork

      “We wanted to use a warm colour to provide a sense of natural earthiness that reflected the red bricks of typical masonry walled gardens, said Al-Jawad.
      “The colour is called Glamis red named after the red sandstone of Glamis Castle in Scotland.”

      Set against the earthy red backdrop, Aesop’s products are displayed on stainless steel shelves. While the main space is broken up by three cast resin sinks that were produced by Sabine Marcelis.
      “We hope we created a calm ambience that enables customers to engage with the Aesop products,” Al-Jawad explained.
      “The hand-washing sinks which are a big part of the customers’ interaction with the product and the sales people are also given centre stage – being made out of honey-coloured resin they also look a bit like big bars of sculpted soap.”

      Aesop often allows its designers to create monotonal stores. For its Sydney store, architecture studio Snøhetta used granite to covers almost every surface, while Frida Escobedo used rammed-earth brickwork throughout its store in Brooklyn. Bernard Dubois also clad the walls of the brand’s Brussels store in distinctive yellow Belgian bricks.
      London-based Al-Jawad Pike was established by Al-Jawad and Dean Pike in 2014. The studio has previously used pigmented concrete blockwork for the exterior and interior of a south London home extension and combined brick, concrete and timber for an extension to a home in Stoke Newington.
      Photography is by Ståle Eriksen.

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