Australian designer Jordana Maisie has designed this shoe shop in San Francisco to look more like a storage room than a boutique.
Masie’s eponymous studio designed the 80-square-metre shoe store in the city’s Jackson Square neighbourhood for upscale Australian leather shoe company Feit.
Working with Feit’s founder Tull Price, Maisie developed the concept for the store to reimagine the traditional layout of shoe shops. Rather than hiding storage, the brand’s cardboard shoe boxes are stacked up in pale wooden shelves that run the length of the store.
“The simplicity of the Feit footwear and care packaging has been elevated as a design element, introducing a repetitive, rhythmic feature that focuses the design experience on the product,” said Maisie.
“The perimeter shelving system provides an enhanced level of service as stock is accessed without leaving the floor,” she added.
San Francisco’s Feit is the third US outpost that Maisie has designed for the company, after locations in two New York neighbourhoods. She has named each outpost as an installation and used the same simple suite of materials – including mirrors, Baltic birch plywood and stainless steel – applied in different ways.
New York’s Nolita store, for example, is called Installation One: Raw Elements of Construction, and fragmented by wooden partition walls. The West Village location, meanwhile, is named Installation Two: Volume and Void and features display areas covered in vertical wood panels.
The new California outpost is named Installation Three: Service and Supply, due to the dual function of the exposed wooden shelving. The shop also places a greater focus on the service programme that Feit offers customers.
Other details in the San Francisco shop include a mirrored wall, making the space appear bigger than it is. Large wooden frames also run down the middle of the long space to offer extra room for display.
Hallow steel rods jut out from the reflective walls and are attached via brown leather straps, which pick up the tones of the products.
Feit was founded by Tull and his brother Josh Price, and Tull is known for starting the cult sneaker brand Royal Elastics in 1996, which sold in 2002.
Feit’s leather products are all handcrafted, and each pair of shoes takes two weeks to produce. Because of this, different styles are often produced in a limited run.
Maisie has created a retail store for Wardrobe in New York City as well, with stark white and scaffolding. She has also designed a restaurant in the city with teal and black colours for Una Pizza Napoletana.
Photography is by Carlos Chavarría.
The post Jordana Maisie stacks cardboard shoe boxes around Feit’s San Francisco store appeared first on Dezeen.