Renuar Center

A department store is several stores that have to agree with each other. Womenswear is bright and open on a pale floor; menswear is dark, tighter and shelved; footwear runs on a long open wall. Each needed its own fixture family, and all three had to be recognisably one shop.

The device that holds it together is the timber table — a heavy machined display table on a rug, repeated on every floor at a different scale. It gives each department a centre and gives the whole store a signature.

The shopfront is a curve, which is expensive and worth it. A flat glass line reads as one more mall unit; a curve pulls people off the concourse before they have decided to come in.