What does Australian jewelry and equipment label Brie Leon have in widespread with Collingwood-based inside designers With out Studio? They’re each younger and dynamic, embracing a thought-about, on a regular basis method in the direction of design. Fairly than working beneath a conventional client-designer relationship, With out Studio’s latest fitout to a Surry Hills shopfront was extra of a collaboration between the inside designers and their design-savvy shopper. Designed to encapsulate a brand new period of the rising Brie Leon model, the flagship retailer stands immediately as a timeless testomony to each designers’ key ideologies – and the facility of restraint.
Founder and artistic director of Brie Leon, Janine Zafra, approached With out Studio with a robust design course and ideas on materiality. “This was such an ideal leaping off level for us to riff off of,” says With out Studio’s artistic director Mel Hasic, whereas additionally acknowledging that “we wouldn’t be doing our job accurately if we didn’t provide one thing our shopper hadn’t thought-about earlier than.” Working off a pared again palette pushed by Zafra, With out Studio rigorously launched furnishings and joinery parts to reaffirm the style model’s distinctive identification inside their flagship retailer.
“We needed to elevate finishes to make them work more durable for us as there have been only a few finishes – all of which have been fairly easy,” explains Hasic. Early on within the undertaking, With out Studio familiarised themselves with Brie Leon merchandise, home materials and upcoming collections. “As we swooned over the ranges, we felt it will be remiss to not use Brie Leon’s personal materiality within the fitout,” shares Hasic.
Lacing the shop with motifs and textures employed by the style designer, the house reads as a scaled up piece of jewelry – or maybe a purse. An outsized chainlink show function not solely nods to the jewelry line, however creates a novel show medium for merchandise. The distinctive entrance door pull and a number of other floral laser minimize steel backplates are modelled off the model’s present assortment and affixed in a manner that enables Brie Leon to exchange them with new shapes seasonally. With out Studio additionally custom-made stools all through the shop utilizing numerous home materials from the model’s present and previous collections.
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Working carefully with customized furnishings makers Poly Designs, With out Studio launched numerous parts within the retailer that embrace quirky detailing and intelligent fabrication methods. Numerous steel plinths are dressed with a cloth skirt, including a tactility and softness. The outsized chainlink function, like many different elements within the retailer, was “primarily a prototype, as we have been figuring every part out as a collective [as the build progressed],” explains Hasic. With the flagship retailer positioned in Sydney, the Melbourne-based designers’ largest problem was time. “We have been engaged in early September and we had a mid-late November retailer opening deadline to satisfy,” shares Hasic. “It made probably the most sense time-wise to work carefully with a fabricator in Melbourne,” provides Hasic. This relationship ended up being what she describes as a really “rewarding and intimate expertise.”
