‘A jewellery shop for shoes’ is how design practice Found Associates describes its scheme for the flagship store of shoe brand Kurt Geiger in central London

Details

Client: Kurt Geiger
Design: Found Associates/John Field
Size: 400 sq m
Completion time: Nine months

Project Details

Twinkling mirrored surfaces and a chandelier made of shoes helped the scheme win Retail magazine’s Retail Interior of the Year award last year, and it has since become a blueprint for the redesign of other Kurt Geiger stores in Liverpool and Newcastle, both of which were also originally designed by Found Associates.

Kurt Geiger was recently named ‘the UK’s coolest shoe brand’ by readers of Vogue magazine, and naturally the interior design of the company’s flagship store had to live up to the reputation of the brand itself. ‘We wanted to make it attractive to younger customers, but also sophisticated and not too gimmicky,’ says Daniel Beardsley, a director at Found Associates.

The brief, says Beardsley, was fairly open, and Kurt Geiger was happy for the designers to experiment with new materials and design processes. ‘Kurt Geiger is a great client in that it’s often up for pushing the boundaries,’ says Beardsley. The design team used a mirrored stretch fabric by Stretch Ceilings overhead in the store, allowing a seamless mirrored effect that wouldn’t have been possible with mirror tiles. It is the first time the material had been used in a UK project.

The store is on two levels with a small ground floor space and a larger basement floor connected by a single staircase, and the mirrored ceiling, as well as looking glamorous, also gives customers upstairs a view of the basement. Mirrored walls also make the store seem larger than it is, while other shiny surfaces, such as polished steel balustrades, twinkle under ceiling-mounted spotlights.

Near the entrance, a chandelier made of shoes, designed by retail designer John Field, creates a glamorous focal point to the ground-floor retail space. The chandelier comprises a structure of polished steel with specially made Perspex plates to hold the 240 shoes displayed. LEDs shine from within the structure to illuminate the shoes. The chandelier has become a visual motif for the brand and will feature in many of Kurt Geiger’s new stores.

Field also designed the other retail displays, which include bespoke stainless-steel shoe risers and custom-made wooden mannequins used to display Kurt Geiger’s new range of accessories.

‘We had a great working relationship with John Field,’ says Beardsley. ‘We were very like-minded in that we all felt that there should be sense of glamour throughout the store, and that it shouldn’t be over the top.’

The upper floor has been designed as a sort of ‘shoe gallery’ with footwear artfully displayed on elegant, 12m-long plinths, according to Beardsley, ‘The ground floor space allows a flexible approach to displaying the shoes and accessories, with mannequins and bespoke shoe risers,’ he says.

In contrast, the basement floor is designed to feel a more comfortable and traditional space with more restrained materials and finishes, such as a nitrated timber floor and cash desk made of the same material. ‘Over time the floor will develop its own patina and take on a weathered look,’ Beardsley explains. Amorphous seats made specially for the store by Hossack and Gray and covered in red felt offset the sharp angles of the plateglass and mirrors.

Striking a balance between these contrasting materials and finishes was probably the greatest challenge on this project, says Beardsley. ‘It was quite challenging to work with so many reflective surfaces,’ he says, ‘and with so many mirrors it was very difficult to visualise the project before it was actually built. We made a physical model to show how the space would work, as it would also have been difficult to envisage in a CAD model. The reflective surfaces look great, but if you don’t work things our carefully you’ll have customers walking into walls.’

suppliers:
Furniture/displays:

•Hossack and Gray - hossackandgray.co.uk
•John Field - johnfield.co.uk

Lighting/Lighting design:

• Lightworks - lightworks.co.uk

Surfaces:

• Perucchetti Plastering - perucchetti.com
• Stretch Ceilings - stretchceilings.co.uk
• Reeve Flooring - reeveflooring.com

This article was first published in fx Magazine.