Shoes are displayed in metal mesh columns at this footwear store in Osaka, Japan (+ slideshow).
Interior designer Ryutaro Matsuura used the see-through wire panels and a neutral palette to create an environment that puts all the emphasis on the shoes.
“When the differences of surrounding decorative environment are suppressed, the items themselves begin to enhance their presence,” he explains.
Shoes are displayed on translucent shelves made from a honeycomb resin sandwich, attached to floor-to-ceiling columns of different circumferences.
Matsuura describes the interior as a “shoe forest”, with “the merchandise hovering like fruits on trees”.
The design gives equal prominence to each product and allows customers to navigate the displays without overbearing design elements influencing their purchasing decision.
Stores tend to be composed of wall shelves and display tables. In those cases, the priority levels for the items at the store and the flows of customers would be set by the sellers. And hence the selection behaviours of the customers tend to be controlled.
So that made us create a pleasant space where customers can find the goods they have hoped for without bias. That was the birth of the shoe store studded with the same C-shaped wire mesh fixtures.
The fixtures have translucent loose shelves for shoes that are made of honeycomb sandwich resin panels. The merchandise hovering like fruits on trees shows its presence in the store that can be described as a “shoe forest”. Customers can enjoy meeting the merchandise and feel a sense of exaltation.
When the differences of surrounding decorative environment are suppressed, the items themselves begin to enhance their presence. Therefore we think that spontaneous perceptions would be educed from customers. And then, imagination and curiosity of the customers would be getting large.
Those feelings will provide a motivation for customers to approach each item, and they will have an opportunity to find the item that really suits. That is what we are expecting.
He said the new offices would “share many of the features of [Facebook’s] headquarters, but will be distinctly Big Apple in design and speak to the unique experience of working in a place like Manhattan.”
Gehry’s design will provide employees with “big, open spaces for people to work and collaborate, and lots of room for conference rooms and cozy spaces where people can meet or grab a white board to talk through ideas on a whim,” Piantino added.
Scheduled for early 2014, the move will double the size of the firm’s engineering offices, which are currently based at 335 Madison Avenue, and will also accommodate sales, marketing, communications and design teams.
Interview:we caught up with Miguel Fluxá, head of shoe brand Camper, at the opening of the brand’s Nendo-designed boutique on Fifth Avenue in New York last month (below). In this short interview, he explains why the company uses different designers for each of its global stores for cultural, rather than business, reasons (+ slideshow).
Designers as diverse as Jaime Hayón and Shigeru Ban have designed stores for Camper. “The world today is becoming a little bit boring, everything is becoming the same,” says Fluxá. “So we thought it was interesting for the brand, and for the cities, to do different designs from one place to the other.”
As a family-owned company, Camper is able to experiment with different design approaches without worrying too much about the commercial impact, he says: “Some concepts work better than others but we don’t measure it really.”
Miguel Fluxá: My name is Miguel Fluxá. I work at Camper and I’m a member of the fourth generation of the company. My great grandfather founded the business 136 years ago and I’m from Mallorca, where Camper is from and where my family comes from. This week we’re in New York, at the store opening on Fifth Avenue that we just did with Nendo.
Marcus Fairs: How did Camper start?
Miguel Fluxá: The story started in 1877 when my great grandfather founded the first shoe factory in Spain, 136 years ago. He had the idea to make good-quality shoes. He was a farmer and he probably didn’t speak any English and he probably didn’t have any money, but he went abroad, to France and England, and he came back after a couple of years with the machinery to set up a shoe factory.
Then after many years, in 1975 my father joined the family business and created Camper as a brand and he incorporated this heritage of knowing how to make quality shoes with design and comfort. He tried to make well-designed shoes that you can wear every day. This is the basis of the product today.
To that we added some cultural values. We come from Mallorca, from the Mediterranean, there’s a slow way of life there. Camper means farmer in Mallorquin, which is the language we speak in Mallorca, and when you mix all these ingredients together, you get Camper. I think the success has probably been trying to make something different, something original with quality.
Marcus Fairs: Camper uses different designers to create different store interiors around the world. Why did you start doing this?
Miguel Fluxá: When we started to open stores outside Spain we thought it was interesting not to repeat them. The world today is becoming a little bit boring, everything is becoming the same. So we thought it was interesting for the brand, and for the cities, to do different designs from one place to the other. We started to do this many years ago and it’s something that has given us a lot of identity and has worked quite well over the years.
Marcus Fairs: Do you do this for cultural or commercial reasons?
Miguel Fluxá: It’s more a cultural thing. We’re lucky to be a privately-owned company, a family-owned company, so we look at the long term and we try to do things that we like to do. Of course we think it’s of benefit to the brand. It’s given a lot of identity to the brand, and customers recognise it.
Marcus Fairs: Do you measure the commercial impact of the interiors?
Miguel Fluxá: Some concepts work better than others but we don’t measure it really.
Marcus Fairs: Footwear, especially sports footwear, is getting really technological with high-tech materials and embedded technology. Is this a path Camper may follow?
Miguel Fluxá: We are interested. For sure we are interested. The DNA of the brand is more in natural leathers, European leathers, and this is our heritage. We are shoemakers, we’re not a sports brand. But it’s true there are more and more techniques, more and more materials. For example in the outsoles there is a lot of development in the lightness of the materials, and also in the uppers.
Miguel Fluxá: Personally I love New York. I spent six months here when I was young. For me it’s probably the capital of the world. A lot of things happen here. A lot of good culture, architecture, museums, food, everything. It’s good to come here from time to time especially if you come from an island, which is completely the opposite.
Marcus Fairs: Do Americans appreciate design in the same way Europeans do?
Miguel Fluxá: In America they do have a good tradition of architecture and design. It’s true that it was probably more in the forties, fifties and sixties than today. But I think there are people who appreciate design, European design. Our design is more European, more refined and more casual, but there are a lot of people here who appreciate it.
Spanish studio Nook Architects stripped out false ceilings and dividing walls to transform two next-door apartments in Barcelona’s gothic quarter into a pair of bright and spacious homes (+ slideshow).
Nook Architects found the two apartments in a poor state, with several adaptations over the years leaving them with a confused layout of compartmentalised rooms and very little natural light.
Layers of false ceilings, flooring and dividing walls were removed and the entrances were relocated to give the apartments a similar size and layout.
Each apartment is organised into a day zone oriented towards the street and a night zone towards the quieter rear facade.
Dividing the two zones is a chunk of wooden flooring, which extends upwards into a bench. Above it is a metal rail that conceals a strip of lighting and acts as a clothes hanger.
The polished concrete floors give way to unpolished concrete in the bathrooms, which are open to the rest of the space, with the showers and toilets separated by a translucent screen.
Twin House Two apartments in Barcelona Nook Architects
From the historic Gothic Quarter in Barcelona, a project for two adjacent apartments arrived to us, which turned out to be a diamond in the rough. The dwellings were on a deplorable state; several low quality interventions from different times overlapped each other.
Its distribution was the result of common customs of the past in which the space was highly compartmentalised, generating small rooms with little or no natural light or ventilation.
The first intervention consisted on stripping down the structure, removing layer after layer of false ceilings, pavements, and coatings, added over the years to the original state. Once the essence of the building was restored, we began our final intervention.
The two existing apartments shared the stair’s landing. The unfortunate placement of the access doors resulted in two different typologies that could barely be distributed under balanced conditions. By relocating the entries and taking into consideration the original elements that were rediscovered, we created a new space that reclaimed the original spirit.
The original wooden beams were treated to avoid future plagues, and were reinforced with steel elements to limit their strain. The same was done with the floor; a compression layer was added, firming up the girder-slab, and evening out the floor level.
This newly sound space, divided by a thick load-bearing wall, was configured in two zones: the day zone, oriented towards the street and the liveliness of the neighbourhood, and the night zone, located on the posterior, more quiet façade.
We arranged the basic elements for the functions and commodities of today, like the kitchen and bathroom, in a subtle manner that was respectful to the space. We therefore treated the kitchen as if it were wooden furniture inside the living room, horizontal, with under the counter refrigerator and freezer to avoid any vertical, tall standing units, and white wall-units that camouflage with the background.
The bathroom was likewise incorporated into the bedroom, leaving the washbasin open to the rest of space, which is only differentiated by changing the floor level. The only compartmentalised elements were the shower and toilet, separated from the rest of the space by a light, and translucent wall.
The two wet zones of the house are therefore contiguous and line the median wall of the neighbouring building, minimising the water and sanitary installations. The glazed tiles boost this idea of a horizontal strip that contains the humid zones, simultaneously revitalising the reclaimed envelope.
A wooden plank was embedded into the concrete floor, establishing a threshold between the living room and the sleeping quarters. This plank then folds and lifts up and turns into a night table or a bench. Above the plank, we placed a metal profile that contains lighting and acts like a hanger and support for possible curtain.
Our objective with this refurbishment with such a tight budget was to create an infrastructure that would hint to the user how personalise it later. A carefully studied configuration of polyvalent and proportionate spaces multiplies the possibilities of two very small dwellings with very large potential.
Two hundred and seventy six teacups are suspended from the ceiling of this coffee shop in Bucharest by Romanian studio Lama Architectura (+ slideshow).
Origo, by Lama Architectura, is a coffee shop by day and a cocktail bar by night.
“Our goal was to create a relaxed atmosphere using natural materials and colours, but also to have a little tension using contrasts,” explain the architects.
A long bar clad with raw metal sheets runs the entire length of the space, topped with a solid oak counter.
Towards the back of the shop the bar is wrapped in a sheet of folded Corten steel.
A jack allows the bar to be raised from 80 centimetres during the day to 110 centimetres in the evening.
Hundreds of teacups form a cloud of white that appears to hover above the bar, described by the architects as “a very airy, white line; a reinterpretation of the manner that glasses are hung over the bar.”
Black-painted walls contrast with the wooden rafters above, which were revealed after dismantling the existing plaster ceiling and painted white.
Carefully angled spotlights create dramatic contrasts between light and dark, casting shadows in the shape of giant teacups onto the walls.
Tables throughout the shop are constructed from criss-crossing metal rods and oak tops, while lightbulbs housed in coffee drippers descend from the rafters above.
Origo is the answer to the demand of a very passionate barista for a place for himself that should function as a coffee-shop during the day and a cocktail bar during the evenings. We like to think of it as his personal urban living in which we discovered some fantastic, authentic and old wooden beams after dismantling the existing plaster ceiling. We kept them and painted them white.
After understanding what is important from his point of view for a great coffee moment, we tried to mirror his beliefs and create a space that would allow coffee to be the star. Our goal was to create a relaxed atmosphere using natural materials and colors, but also have a little tension using contrasts (dark grey versus light wood color, wood versus metal).
The bar is the main element of the interior (almost over scaled for such a small place) and has a jack that allows it to rise from 80 cm during the day to 110 cm in the evenings. It is finished from raw metal sheets for the front face and Corten and oak massive wood for the counter top.
The massiveness of the bar is contrasting with the 276 cups installation that is floating above, a very aery, white line, an reinterpretation of the manner that glasses are hanged over the bar.
We designed the lighting fixtures having in mind the love for coffee and using coffee drippers. We have also designed the tables especially for this project.
The Kites series of wall panels by WallArt strive to give new life to your home or business, simply by adding dimension and style to your walls. The ecofriendly 3d wall panels are made out of the fibrous residue of sugarcane. The raw materials used is 100% recycled, compostable, and therefore 100% biodegradable, contributing to the sustainability of the product. Their green quality, style, and innovative production make ‘em an easy choice for interior walls that need a little oomph!
In our third movie about this year’s World Architecture Festival and Inside Festival, architect, designer and Inside Festival jury chair Nigel Coates discusses his breakthrough interiors project Caffè Bongo and explains what he will be looking for when judging the awards.
Middle and Over Wallop restaurant by Nigel Coates at Glyndebourne opera house
“I don’t really see interior design as a discipline,” says Coates. “I see it as a phenomenon. I call it ‘atmos’: when something special happens in an interior which isn’t just functional or stylistic.”
Otaru Marittimo Hotel by Nigel Coates
He goes on to explain that, for him, a good interior “needs to communicate something extra. Not just to a visitor but to the person who lives in it, who’s familiar with it. It needs to create a warmth, cause a kind of alchemy in the way you exist in it.”
Caffè Bongo, Tokyo
Coates says his breakthrough in interiors came in 1986 with Caffè Bongo in Tokyo. Inspired by Italian director Federico Fellini’s 1960s movie La Dolce Vita, the café combined classical statues and architectural elements with parts of an aeroplane that had seemingly crashed into it.
“[It] may seem completely wild,” says Coates. “But I still assert that the crashed aircraft into that building was calm compared with the other nonsense that was going on up and down the street.
“There was an aircraft wing at the top of the window. Charles Jencks described it as a crash. I would see it more as a fusion of the biggest object that symbolises movement and the architectural condition of the window.”
The Waterhouse at South Bund by Neri&Hu, winner of the 2011 Inside Festival awards
When judging the awards for this year’s Inside Festival, which takes place in Singapore in October, Coates will be looking for projects that “create a sort of chemistry”.
He says: “What I want to see is the translation of an idea. If it’s just based on style and nice finishes, even clever organisation, that’s not enough. The idea needs to translate into some kind of sensual experience, it needs to capture you.
“Interiors can be dismissed, but if we’re talking about excellence, I think it’s just as hard to do a good interior as it is to do a good building.”
Leander Angerer and David Ross’ revamp of this late Victorian staircase introduces subtle modern touches to accentuate the classical style. Tennis racket string sewn into the handrail replaces the banisters while a floating marble plinth replaces the first step. Other extraneous parts were taken away and hand-modified to give it a lighter, renewed aesthetic. Not only nice to look at, the strings can also be plucked, turning the house itself into a giant musical instrument!
– Yanko Design Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world! Shop CKIE – We are more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design! (Musical Stairs was originally posted on Yanko Design)
This renovated apartment in Berlin features raw concrete ceilings and floors that combine oak parquet with decorative tiles (+ slideshow).
Local architects Marc Benjamin Drewes and Thomas Schneider teamed up to design the apartment for a couple and their children, creating two bedrooms, a bathroom and an open-plan living room and kitchen.
The project is named Box 117 and the architects refer to the two white-painted bedrooms and bathroom as “simple boxes” with a narrow shadow gap around the tops of the walls to highlight the edges.
The wooden parquet flooring runs down one side of the apartment beneath white-washed timber ceilings. The red and white cement tiles are positioned on the opposite side underneath the exposed concrete ceilings.
“The raw concrete ceilings are preserving the industrial character,” says Drewes. “Partly old with a wooden pattern, partly new with a smooth surface, the ceiling tells something about the history of the space.”
Each room has a floor-to-ceiling height of 3.4 metres, allowing for overhead storage and an elevated sleeping area in the children’s bedroom.
Here’s a project description from Marc Benjamin Drewes:
Box 117
A couple with two little kids moved into this loft in a Berlin backyard.
A continuous space for a kitchen, living area and sleeping area for the parents surrounds two boxes in which you find the children’s room and the bathroom. This open layout creates the loft character of the space.
Floor plan
The children are sleeping in a niche above a litte storage next to the children’s room. That way one takes advantage of the clear height of 3.4m to create more living area. The sleeping area of the parents can be closed with a room-high sliding door. If the door is open it disappears behind the bathroom-box.
The oak parquet and the cement tiles on the floor are creating a basis full of character for the simple boxes with a limewash coat. A shadow gap all around separates these boxes from the existing elements of the space and all doors are flush with the wall to accentuate the simple form. The raw concrete ceilings are preserving the industrial character. Partly old with a wooden pattern, partly new with a smooth surface the ceiling tells something about the history of the space.
David Rockwell has parlayed a knack for creating “immersive environments” into a discipline-shattering firm that can move seamlessly from designing luxury hotels and the set for the Academy Awards to reinventing playgrounds and dreaming up some damn fine rugs. We asked writer Nancy Lazarus to immerse herself in all things Rockwell when the man himself took the stage last week as a keynoter at Internet Week New York.
Treading the boards, on treadmills. The “abstracted collage of a factory” created by Rockwell Group for the musical adaptation of the 2005 British film Kinky Boots.
David Rockwell gave a whirlwind tour of selected design projects during a session at Internet Week in New York. The Rockwell Group founder offered insight into how his firm’s interactive design LAB operates as they solve design dilemmas for clients in the worlds of hospitality, travel, and theatre. He also previewed pending assignments.
Rockwell observed that as his career progressed, technology has taken center stage. “The technology lab is embedded in my firm, and my work now with the lab is the most exciting. It engages technology to connect people more in real-time.” From the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas to the JetBlue terminal at New York’s JFK airport to the set design for the Broadway musical Kinky Boots, Rockwell has incorporated technology and choreography-focused designs. Below are his comments on selected projects.
On the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas: “The promise of Las Vegas is of a place that reinvents itself, but in reality that’s not true, since visitors can’t move freely,” said Rockwell. “The hotel lobby was fourteen feet high and had massive Egyptian-style columns. Our designers worked to dematerialize the walls in an open-source way so people would have a different experience each time they entered. The casino, unlike others in Vegas, was vertical, so we blew a forty-square-foot hole through the podium.”
Rockwell Group used an “environmental choreography system and created a hall of images in the hotel lobby, to allow more personal interaction.” The effect has been “somewhat hypnotic”, though the hotel would prefer visitors to linger in the casino, he noted. continued…
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