Once upon a time, in an old Chinese Grocery store in the lower Manhattan, Max Sanjulian, principal of Volido, designed what claims to be the most exclusive home for emerging international fashion designers in New York. Viviane Westwood Anglomania, Henrik Vibskov, C.Neon and TV among others in its racks…the space is EVA.
Volido, running away from the traditional approach to fashion-retail space, choose Fast, Cheap and Smart as positive qualities inherent to the best contemporary designs. With the Fashion Industry, highly monopolized by corporates, this attitude seems to be the way to go in order to survive independently in places like Manhattan, Tokyo, London or Paris.
The Fluorescent tube-lit hybrid space is now conceived to combine fashion sales, temporary art exhibits and events in a very long and narrow lot. Economy of movements with long and straight lines are framing the clothing and articulating the indoor seating areas at the same time.
The combination of the spatial-anorexia, emphasized with the narrowness of the perspective, and the transparency of the full operable clear panel glass façade, swallow the eyes of the passerby. The store front emphasizes this effect with the dissolution of the limits between interior and exterior offering an outdoor-indoor-seating-stage area that has already become a hang out point for the regular downtown fashionistas.

Firm: Volido
Architect/designer: Max Sanjulian