Unique Retail Spaces win Top Design Award

October 8, 2007

Unique Retail Spaces win Top Design Award

A fantasy land for fashionable little girls; a space for ‘gadget freaks’ and a retail haven for ladies who love lacy lingerie, are the winners of this year’s 2007 BeST Design Awards Retail Environment Award.

The three Auckland retail stores - Trelise Cooper Kids, Sony Style Sylvia Park and Bendon St Lukes – beat off 11 other finalists in the category to win gold at the Designers Institute of New Zealand’s annual BeST Design Awards, which were presented at a glittering black tie event at Auckland’s Aotea Centre on Friday, October 5.

The awards, which are considered to be the foremost design awards in New Zealand, are judged across three design disciplines: product, spatial (interiors) and graphics.

Trelise Cooper Kids, which was designed by Derek Lockwood, Global Design Director of Saatchi & Saatchi, stays true to Trelise Cooper's signature retail aesthetic of white spaces and eclectic furnishings, yet has been tailored specifically to suit its young clientele.

The space offers clothes racks that hang at children's height, a catwalk with changeable floor-windows and a detailed Michelangelo-esque ceiling painting.

Designed to appeal to both kids and adults, no aspect of the store’s design has been overlooked, as is evident with the lavish dressing rooms.

Said Design Director Derek Lockwood: "One has mirrored walls, a mirrored ceiling and mirrored floor, another total red shag pile, the third drips in lace and the fourth is decked out in velvet – a feast for the imagination that is designed to appeal as much to the adults as to the kids."

Lockwood said the aim with the design was to fuel the imaginations of the young people who came in to the store.

“We wanted to provide kids with the opportunity to explore their own imaginations inside a playground of fashion,” said Lockwood.

Sony Style at Sylvia Park, which also took a gold in the Retail Environment category, was designed by Gareth Huston of Interior Woodhams Meikle Zhan.

The space remains true to the Sony Style philosophy of actively encouraging people to spend time in the showroom, with designated spaces for people to watch television, listen to music or play on a computer.

Design Director Gareth Huston said creating a relaxed and enjoyable environment for people to experience the latest Sony products was a key objective of the design.

“The Sony Style design philosophy, which has been developed over the past eight years, holds to the premise that the technology should be as interactive as possible within the constraints of a shopping environment. The 200m2 space was designed specifically to draw customers in and then circulate them past the interactive stands of the main selling items.”

Huston said he approached the design with the intention of creating a strong robust environment that had a ‘presence’ to it.

“Material selection was fundamental to the design as was the treatment to the floors and ceilings. We chose a black anodised stainless steel cladding on the front bunker, which was designed to give the customer a glimpse into the Sony world and act as a shop front with the noisiest audiovisual system they had.”

With the exception of the bunker, all display fixtures were designed to be part of the main body of the store.

“The end result was a strong retail environment that supported the vast range of Sony products,” said Huston.

A very different retail space for lovers of fine lingerie was awarded the third gold in the category.

Bendon St Lukes, an upmarket boutique located in one of Auckland’s favourite shopping malls, is just one of 30 Bendon stores Auckland interior design company, Space Studio, has designed.

Design Director of Space Studio, Vee Smit said the overriding design objective with each of the Bendon stores was to create a space that provided customers with a unique retail experience.

“To achieve this, each Bendon store is designed as an individual space with a differing theme. Different levels of communication with the customer is achieved through fixed and versatile merchandising elements.”

Smit describes the St Luke’s store as fusion of ‘Victorian Stark’ with an underlying story of a “Good Girl Goes Hunting.” While it’s not something that you’d expect from a boutique selling delicate lingerie, the judges said Smit managed to pull it off with style.

Design elements such as antlers, birds and a vitrienne cabinet containing good girls’ treasured, found and hunted objects reinforce the Good Girls Go Hunting theme, as do the decadent dressing rooms.

“I like to think of them as a forest, where people go to hunt for that perfect piece of lingerie,” said Smit of the dressing rooms, which feature woodland imagery on their exterior panels.

Smit said the brightly coloured dressing rooms are one of the standout design features of the space.

“The fitting rooms are designed to surprise and delight and are in sharp contrast to the monochromatic colour of the retail area. Vibrant pinks, caged birds and ornamental white horse heads hung over bold zebra prints, further reinforce the hunting theme, albeit in a different vein.”

A wader-clad mannequin at the store’s entry, who toys with a young man caught in her jewel encrusted fishing rod, provides a lightness and humour to the space.

Other winners in the Retail Environment category included: Adrian Nancekivell Design, who won a silver for the design of Barkers Sylvia Park; Gascoigne Associates, who took two bronzes for the design of Redcurrent Sylvia Park and Eighteen 73; and Martin Hughes Architecture Interiors, who won bronze for the design of Inovo.

The BeST Design Awards originated in 1988 and have been held annually since 1996.

www.bestawards.co.nz

ENDS

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