Design studio Tutto Bene has unveiled fashion floors and private shopping space at a department store in Basel, juxtaposing concrete floors and steel details with soft drapery and illuminated laminated paper.
The fashion floors at the Globus Basel department store, located in the heart of the Swiss city, have been given a new look as part of a wider overhaul of the retailer.
The interior was kept “intentionally quiet”
Designers Felizia Berchtold and Oskar Kohnen of Tutto Bene took the exterior of the department store, which has an original art nouveau facade, into consideration when creating the new interior.
“The art nouveau facade brought a rare gift for a department store: daylight and a constant visual relationship to the city,” Berchtold told Dezeen. “Rather than mimic its historic language, we kept the interior intentionally quiet – allowing the original grandeur to remain legible from the outside, while abstracting its facade rhythm into the illuminated perimeter frame on the shop floor.”
Sheer drapes were used to let light in
To showcase the fashion pieces, the studio drew on art gallery layouts and added softly illuminated lightboxes that snake through the rooms.
“We approached fashion as the artwork and the interior as its architectural frame: a gallery-like system reduced to the essential so product can be read with clarity,” Kohnen told Dezeen.
“A continuous illuminated frame of columns and architraves organises movement, hierarchy and rhythm across the floors – monumental yet practical, like a contemporary aqueduct.”
Blocks of colour help users navigate the fashion floors
Tutto Bene kept the colour palette of the fashion floors mostly black and white, but added a few blocks of colour. These were used “as navigation cues rather than decoration – avoiding the still often gender-coded retail palette,” the studio explained.
When it came to surfaces, the designers deliberately blended hard and soft materials, contrasting the concrete floor with sheer drapes.
Cubitts West Village by Tutto Bene is a “stage for spectacles”
“We reduced the palette to hard-wearing, infrastructural materials suited to high traffic: large-format tiles, black steel fixtures, and an exposed ceiling that stays deliberately raw,” Berchtold said.
“Against this, we introduced softness through illuminated Japanese laminated paper and sheer drapery at the windows, creating moments of atmosphere and calm.”
The Collector’s Apartment features monochrome blue hues
As well as the main fashion floors, the studio designed The Collector’s Apartment – a space specially tailored for private shopping. Here, Tutto Bene used a different colour palette from the main floor.
“It begins with colour as experience, using monochrome blues to create a calmer, more intimate, residential mood,” Kohnen said.
“We anchored the room in a spectrum of icy-to-midnight blues with warm woods and graphic black accents, punctuated by art objects to complete the sense of a personal collection.”
The mirrored dressing room has a trompe l’oeil-print
The Collector’s Apartment space also features a mirrored dressing room, decorated with a custom-made drape screen printwork designed by Tutto Bene.
The designers sourced a number of art pieces for the space, including a ceramic bowl and a wall sculpture from Two Rooms Gallery.
Tutto Bene created a “gallery-like” interior at Globus Basel
Vintage furniture also decorates the private shopping area, such as Tokyo bar stools by designer Rodney Kinsman and a 1970s coffee table by architect Cini Boeri. In addition, Tutto Bene created a bespoke ebonised wood table for the space.
“We wanted the suite to read as a real, private penthouse: pieces with a lived-in scale and fluid vintage silhouettes to counter the suite’s rational, architectural frame,” Berchtold concluded.
Tutto Bene recently opened the doors to its Milan office during the city’s design week and designed a Cubitts store in New York’s West Village.
The photography is by Ludovic Balay.
