Top Designers Redefine Global Shops and Showrooms

August 16, 2023

Words: Wilson Barlow

Words: Lisa Di Venuta

Global brands turn to cosmopolitan influences, tactile traditions, and leading design firms to raise the bar in their shops and showrooms stateside and beyond.

For an entirely immersive experience, the Indian company’s own hand-knotted carpets enliven not only the floorsof the 8,400-square-foot showroom but also its walls and myriad staircases. The latter are steel covered in a gradient of color and lead down to a central hospitality area inspired by ancestral Rajasthani architecture, featuring archways and a custom table of rose-gold legs and a Tundra gray marble top etched with an intricate Jaipuri pattern.

Joining New York and London locations, the 32,000-square-foot maison is the main “temple” to the luxury French jeweler, its six levels a place of origin and collective memory, renovated to obtain the highest grade of BREEAM certification. Three floors encompass 10 salons, which are followed by workshops, archives, and a penthouse residence, all capped by glass ceiling over an atrium conceived in the spirit of a traditional Parisian inner courtyard.

The 2,300-square-foot shop selling ready-to-wear clothing for young professionals combines outer-space and polar-region modes, fashion and architecture into one minimalist whole through fitting rooms lit by color-changing LEDs and surfaces reminiscent of quilted coats. Randomly placed, angled mirrors are intended to change perspectives, spurinspiration, and echo the bustling energy of urban life.

For their first U.S. outpost, cofounder Giada Forte and art director Robert Vattilana of the Italian women’s clothing, shoes, and accessories label composed a desert vista with a skylit palette reflective of locale via resin-coated flooring, limewashed brick walls, and native greenery. Brass details add Hollywood glamour, while two stacked stones, a nod to a Fischli/Weiss sculpture, were sourced in Palm Springs.

Since the heritage ceramics supplier’s name means spider in Italian, the 4,300-square-foot flagship showroom isa web of marble, cement, and stone inspiration and a kaleidoscopic sequence of rooms, with spinneret-esque wooden displays; jewel-toned tiles arranged into murals of Persian domes, Egyptian minarets, and Roman columns; and a continuous mosaic slab serving as flooring.

Projects

A growing congregation in northern Italy is blessed by San Giacomo Apostolo Church, a new complex by Benedetta Tagliabue-EMBT that’s both contemporary and contextual.

Projects

For Here-O, a Middle Eastern donut brand, Roar conceived of an interior design meant to entice and wow pastry-lovers, complete with a sugary pink palette.

Projects

In 2002, Italian siblings Giada and Paolo Forte launched a fashion collection of hand-finished T-shirts, designed in a few rooms of their mother’s house. Their warehouse was the garage; their studio faced the garden in…

Projects

Tomo Design transforms a colonial-period house in Guangzhou, China, into an intriguingly quirky, IRL emporium for online streetwear brand MasonPrince.

Projects

Studio Anand Sheth brings a thoughtful approach to Retool’s San Francisco and New York offices, crafting both spaces with a colorful, modern palette.

Projects

This spacious Manhattan loft embodies a true marriage of design, drawing on aesthetics from Mexico and Israel—the homeowners’ native locales.