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Architects: balbek bureau
- Area: 417 m²
- Year: 2024
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Photographs:ONI studio
Text description provided by the architects. Milla Nova is a boutique of the Ukrainian wedding and evening dresses brand in Warsaw, Poland. The brand has been successfully representing Ukrainian design in more than 50 countries for 20 years. The founders of Milla Nova, Zoryana and Iryna Senyshyn, entrusted the bureau with the work on their first foreign mono-boutique. The clients wanted to move away from the standard aesthetics of bridal salons and gave the project team complete creative freedom.
Location and Challenges - The location for the Milla Nova showroom in Warsaw was Lipinski Passage, a historic building dating back to 1899 located on Jerusalem Avenue, one of the city's key streets. The main entrance to the future salon is located inside the building, and some of the windows also overlook the interior of the passage, which requires appropriate solutions for lighting and privacy. The active phase of the project coincided with Polish farmers blocking the Ukrainian border, further complicating the already difficult logistics: most of the custom elements were made in Ukraine and had to be delivered to the location by truck. CONCEPT - For the flagship in the Polish capital, we found inspiration in the starry depths of space and offered an interior inspired by the stellar minimalism of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey". We wanted to play on the contrast between the bride's delicate image and the brutal extraterrestrial landscapes. The first floor, which serves as a showroom for evening dresses, resembles the desert surface of distant planets. The local landscape is stark – you can see rock fragments, large stone panels, and massive podiums all around. The shapes and shine of the screens refer to Kubrick's monoliths. We present wedding dresses in the interior of the second floor, inspired by the interior spaces of intergalactic ships – unearthly and at the same time humanized and cozy. The colors and textures are smoother and more delicate, based on nuances.
Design - At first glance, the design of the space was simple and minimalistic, without complex textures – but this is what made the implementation difficult. Finding the right texture and shades required a lot of effort. To realize our ideas, we needed a lot of custom elements – 90% of the showroom's decor was created by the Ukrainian contractor C.I.Form according to the bureau's sketches. The Milla Nova showroom occupies three floors of the passage. The building's basement houses technical rooms, a tailor shop, and a showroom warehouse. On the ground floor, to the right of the showroom's main entrance from inside the passage, customers are greeted by a reception with a compact waiting area. The reception desk is made of stainless steel according to an individual sketch – its rectangular shape with a curved circle refers to the moon. This object looks deceptively simple, but it is a painstaking work: the steel is bent on factory machines and then joined to the frame. To the right of the counter, a large custom lightbox is mounted on the wall, broadcasting the brand's promotional videos, which were created to match the interior of the salon.
To the left of the entrance is the showroom's main sales area with windows to the street: evening gowns are displayed on rails and podiums. The floor is covered with micro cement and resembles the worn and scratched surface of the planet. To make the space look less chaotic, we added a metal line to the floor that visually connects the rails. The podiums are made of epoxy resin. The key design element of this area is the stones: made partly of gypsum and partly of painted foam covered with microcement. According to our idea, the blocks should not only be visually realistic but also resemble real stones in texture and weight. The stone panel imitating marble was created according to our sketch from plywood on a frame. Then it was covered with microcement and plaster in a dozen layers to achieve a realistic rough texture and uneven edges. The seams on the final product are invisible, and the pattern of the stone perfectly reproduces the original visualizations. To the right of the reception are three fitting rooms with a waiting area. Their space is decorated with a lightbox with adjustable color temperature lighting.
Climbing the stairs to the second floor, customers find themselves in a lounge for demonstrating wedding dresses. The focal point of this space is a massive sofa. The panel behind it is made of plasterboard and covered with hand-carved wooden panels. The upholstered group is complemented by Driade Roly Poly chairs and natural wood stumps. The lighting is provided by the Moooi chandelier from the Flock of Light series – one of the few non-custom elements in the showroom design. A rounded wall in this area hides a small kitchen where the staff can prepare drinks for guests.
There are four fitting rooms for future brides on the floor. We placed one of them in an oval semi-closed area – its contours are repeated by a backlit mirror. The main focus of this space is on the future bride; the interior serves as a neutral background with smooth lines and tactile materials. Next to the oval, the minimalist fitting room with a window is a favorite among clients. It has the best natural light from the window facing the street. The lamp was custom-made – contractors baked clay and tinted it to achieve the desired shade. The podiums in the fitting rooms are made of plaster covered with micro cement and hand-painted. The small coffee table is also made of plaster covered with micro cement with a metal top. To the left of the oval area is the largest fitting room with a terracotta-colored wall. Restoring the correct texture and tone of the decorative plaster took the contractors a long time. While working on Milla Nova, we managed to perfectly realize our ambitious ideas – one-to-one, just like in the visualizations. Behind the deceptively minimalist space, there was a lot of meticulous work on textures and details. This project strengthened our expertise in retail and opened up a new world of wedding business for us – we were happy to create a space for special moments in the lives of the brand's clients.
