John Pawson completes gallery-style interiors for Milan’s Valextra retailer

Easy plaster surfaces and gray stone flooring assist create a gallery-like setting contained in the Valextra retailer in Milan, which has been overhauled by British designer John Pawson.

One among a number of high-end trend boutiques on By way of Manzoni, the Valextra retailer is designed by Pawson to merge “minimalism, clear class and restrained luxurious”.

“The house seems rigorous, monumental; that is an all-encompassing, pure architectural undertaking which completely redefines the scope of the shop’s interiors,” defined the model, which makes luxurious purses and leather-based equipment.

“The imaginative and prescient of the intervention is just not merely to create a container for the product, however a spatial narrative that enhances the expertise of proportion, floor, and scale.”

Since 2015, Valextra has yearly approached a special architect or designer to overtake the shop’s interiors – final yr noticed New York-based studio Snarkitecture cowl the ceiling with billowing clouds of white cloth.

For this intervention, Pawson utilized his usually restrained color palette to type a “versatile canvas” towards which the model can show its merchandise.

Surfaces within the three-room retailer are completely lined with pale gray plaster to match the prevailing Ceppo di Gré stone flooring. Plaster has additionally been used to type platform-style cabinets and chunky show tables.

Openings puncture the peripheral partitions, permitting passersby on the road to look by means of to the rear of the house.

A suspended ceiling has additionally been erected, components of which have been lower away to type fake skylights that shine down on merchandise displayed beneath.

“The architectural language of simplicity produces a gallery-like inside, whose charged character derives from the restrained use of color and light-weight,” added the model.

This isn’t the primary retail house that John Pawson has designed – final yr he developed pared-back interiors for the Jil Sander flagship in Tokyo, which options pale limestone partitions and cherry wooden furniture.

Again in 2015 Pawson additionally lent his minimalist aesthetic to designer Christopher Kane’s first brick-and-mortar retailer in London.

This Valextra department additionally sits proper subsequent door to The Manzoni – a restaurant by Tom Dixon that doubles up as a furnishings showroom and the designer’s European headquarters.