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Architects: Schemata Architects
- Area: 3306 m²
- Year: 2017
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Photographs:Nacasa & Partners
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Manufacturers: Nippon Paint, Rock Paint, Washin Chemical Industry
Text description provided by the architects. We designed a new Ginza flagship for LOFT, a household goods specialty store. Our aim was to design interior spaces where customers feel like staying for a long time and strolling around thoroughly. The store occupies spaces from the third to sixth floors in a building, with each floor carrying a different merchandise category.
Each floor has a floor area of approximately 990 m2, and escalators are located at the center of the large space. Since the spatial depth of sales areas would be too large if the original layout was to be used as it was, our design started by locating a large “ring road” or the main customer circulation around the escalators and located sales areas on both sides of the circulation with the equal spatial depth as much as possible. Places where people gather, such as cash register areas and labs, are located in the areas at the far ends of the floor, intending to activate customers’ movements by extending the circulation in the X direction.
These areas are designed in unique ways to attract people’s attention, and some of the labs are designed and fabricated using 3-D printing by DUS architects from the Netherlands. Different materials and shapes are used to make display shelves according to the types of merchandise handled on each floor so that customers can enjoy the difference between all floors as well as the entire traveling sequence.
The 3rd floor is composed of curve-shaped display shelves placed in the concentric layout; the 4th floor is equipped with box-shaped display shelves composed of a combination of white-painted wood boxes and lauan wood boxes, laid out along the 45-degree axis; the 5th floor is composed of steel racks that are functional yet simple in the extreme; the 6th floor offers a flexible floor layout composed of a combination of boxes and pallets. The store environment with a rich variety of design features offers customers joyful shopping experiences throughout all the floors, while the consistency of the basic composition creates a unified store identity.
