The luxury fashion label’s new stores play on Joseph’s signature design details and the brand’s split personality — Anglo-Franco, black and white, masculine and feminine. The design intentionally focusses on these opposites while also drawing upon cultural references to the individual store locations.
In London, we worked with a classical Savile Row traditional townhouse which had a Georgian interior. We painted it black with a giant rubber ball door handle. We framed each collection story with a black rail and hung the clothes on a white rail within — a play on opposites. This bespoke display system allows collections to be framed in surprising juxtapositions against a neutral colour palette that unites all the stores.
We have a set palette for Joseph stores but each one has its own unique charm. In Miami, designing on a much bigger scale, we drew upon the city’s Art Deco and grand architectural gestures to inform the 260 square-metre space, where all the architecture goes to that point of being straight and orthogonal.
We studied a series of spiral staircases that were adopted in the 40s and 50s and we created what we call the ‘Joseph corkscrew’; a huge, black, giant spiral staircase, where you don’t see any white from the outside, and then as soon as you enter the staircase, you’ve got this beautiful white stone on the inside.