creative spaces
Stores aren’t just places to buy stuff; they are a rich source of interiors inspiration too. We asked the designers shaping the nation’s most innovative retail spaces what we can learn from a trip to the high street
During the pandemic, popping to the shops transformed overnight into something disconcertingly different, as bare shelves, masks and queues accelerated our reliance on e-commerce (see the ubiquitous Amazon delivery van on every street in the land). But while there’s no denying the convenience of doorstep deliveries, there’s something special about a shop. As novelist Emile Zola noted a century ago in The Ladies’ Paradise, stores are not just spaces for customers to see, touch and smell the things they might want to buy, but portals, whether to a totally different perspective, as with Jacquemus’ surreal Selfridges boutique, or to a wildflower meadow in the heart of the city, courtesy of Fred Rigby Studio for Lestrange.
Smart brands such as Aesop seek out neighbourhoods where a strong sense of place is prized by locals, and deliberately work with designers who can reflect that in the store’s aesthetic, whether by salvaging debris from nearby demolition sites or nodding to the area’s heritage through subtle visual cues. For its new Marylebone location, Aesop commissioned furniture maker Sebastian Cox to craft English-grown oak shelves that were filled with paperbacks in homage to the area’s bookshops and the British Library down the road. The Aesop design team told us, ‘We were fascinated by Cox’s care and love for wood. We had been waiting for the right opportunity to come up, to offer him the right conditions to showcase his skills.’
Oskar Kohnen Studio designed Londonbased paint company Lick’s very first bricks-and-mortar store, also finding inspiration in its location (Northcote Road in Battersea), as well as in photographs of the high street from the 1950s. ‘Every one of those stores used their own simple colour combination to give identity. It’s so beautiful how colour was used back then,’ Kohnen observes, going on to explain that he wanted to celebrate paint as one of the most immediate, intuitive ways to create a space. ‘We live in a time where interiors are full of marble and precious finishes. I wanted to do the opposite,’ he says.
The desire to root a shop in its environs isn’t just driven by aesthetic or emotional
