Nicky Lobo recently caught up with Antonia Pesenti and Patricia Bondin of MAKE Creative for DQ’s Top Ten 2012. Before you meet them in the magazine, get to know their design process on one of their standout projects, edgy fashion brand Ginger & Smart.

“It was about trying to maintain the position of this brand but in a hyper mall environment. How do we look different from everyone else?

 

“The store’s super simple, and has a really simple palette of materials. There’s just a box in the store that holds the change rooms and the storeroom at the back. All of it was really based on this layering of textures, and we placed this industrial felt wall that was made up of studded panels that ran down one side of the store. That has quite an unusual presence and makes a great backdrop to all their beautiful fabrics and prints.

 

“We were also able to, within the store, document the whole design process. We had all these great artisans working on the project – the guy who was putting the felt together, another guy who was making the Perspex, we had a lot of steel work, steel façade, that sort of thing. We documented the whole process, which was looping in the stores on these little screens.

 

 

 

“A lot of the malls are about the finished product, not the story of the store or the brand. We wanted the store to have an ephemeral feel, as if it was a series of elements that had been put together in a gallery space. It’s not all over-finished and built in. We tried to keep the lighting out of the recesses. It’s about all these objects that have been positioned in the store.

 

 

 

“There are lots of lovely details as well, like we wrapped the hanging rails in leather and they were studded as well, there were stud positions where the hanger sits. The micro level and then the macro. We really worked through what you see as a whole then as you move closer and discover. And Alexandra and Genevieve, that’s really part of their… their clothes are really beautifully finished, there’s a lot in the detail and in the way the clothes are produced.”

 

 

Check out DQ’s Top Ten in the upcoming issue #45, on sale 11 April. Stay tuned for more Top Ten stories in the coming weeks.

MAKE Creative
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