Flagship Enterprise

‘If the Internet can win the price war, bricks and mortar have to win the excitement factor,’ opines Simon Mitchell, co-founder of London-based Sybarite Architects, which has designed many stores for Marni. ‘Retailers now have to make their stores brand experiences, as customers increasingly buy goods online.’ Meanwhile, Matthew Brown, the managing director of creative retail trade agency Echochamber, says, ‘Shops today are about allowing customers to connect with the brand in deeper ways through hospitality, service, storytelling.’

Also keeping high-end retailers on their toes is the growing trend known as ‘push to posh’, in which mass market brands invest in high-end interior design. Uniqlo’s flagship store in New York, for example, was designed by the top-end retail architects of Wonderwall.

One retail designer who strongly advocates individuality is Tokujin Yoshioka, who has created the interior of Issey Miyake’s new London flagship store. He may have designed over 150 Issey Miyake stores but he aims to make each one unique, chiefly by responding to context. ‘There’s a trend now for hotels with the same homogeneous luxury design all over the world,’ he says. ‘We need to go to the next step and create spaces where people can enjoy a place’s locality and nationality.’ His design for the new London store utilizes structural elements of the original 1950s building, formerly a bank. He has stripped back columns and walls to expose roughly textured concrete surfaces, juxtaposing them with aluminium panels in a highly singular shade of copper sulphate blue.

Shoe brand Camper also sets store by individuality, hiring well-known designers and architects – from Nendo to Shigeru Ban – to dream up its store interiors. In Shanghai, Chinese architects Neri & Hu have created a striking flagship store, a new building inserted into an old industrial warehouse, whose design was a response to its context. Indeed, made of reclaimed, locally sourced timber frames and grey bricks, it’s intended to evoke a typical Shanghai alleyway called a nongtang.

Conversely, Zaha Hadid’s boutiques for fashion label Neil Barrett – she has designed four in Seoul and one in Hong Kong – pay no heed to context. Yet they do make a bid for individuality. In fact, Hadid’s highly personal design language is responsible for the shops’ unique aesthetic, the key feature being their glacier-like display systems.

These originated as a single element, which was chopped into sections and then installed in all the shops, giving this group of boutiques a cohesive and individual identity. Overshadowed by Hadid’s gigantic, striking sculptural display units, the clothing on display almost looks like an afterthought.

Like Yoshioka and Neri & Hu’s shop interiors, Hadid’s fulfills the ultimate aim of every retail designer today: to create a memorable space.