The Milan store for the Italian eyewear brand is the company’s first concept store in Europe. It is located at via Fiori Chiari 16 in the Brera district, an area renowned for its cobbled streets and courtyards as well as its arts and cultural scene. The concept store reflects the brand’s values of authenticity and contemporaneity as well as its long history, setting up a series of dualities that reflect these characteristics: craftsmanship and industrialisation; rough and smooth, continuous and discontinuous, past and present.
The interior is stripped back to reveal its original gneiss rock floors, plastered brick walls and granite columns, to create an almost archaeological backdrop. The architectonic shell creates a sequence of four interiors divided by three portals, generating a temporal and spatial rhythm inside the store, which enables the organisation of the Persol products in different ways.
The recovered architecture becomes an historic container for a contemporary insertion which takes the form of a series of self-supporting aluminium wings; curved curtains forming niches that reveal the regenerated building fabric behind. The eyewear is placed on glass and aluminium shelves that slide into the gaps between the horizontal metal bands, which also provide an electrical connection.
Furnishings built from solid oak pieces sit in the centre of the spaces, their craftsmanship contrasting the industrial nature of the aluminium displays. On the ceiling, artificial domed skylights, illuminate the rooms with indirect and diffused ambient lighting that recalls natural light.
Dates:2019
Gross floor area:118m2
Client:Nextore srl
Architect:David Chipperfield Architects Milan
Photography:Gerhardt Kellermann