Architects:Estudio Além

Area:3283 ft²

Year:2022

Photographs:Francisco Ascensão

Lead Architects:Paula Navarro Mazón, Filipe Nunes Faustino

Program: Retail. Commercial.

City: Guimarães

Country: Portugal

The project consists of the remodeling of the interior of a commercial space. The renovation of the locale must achieve two goals: a clear display of the product and a striking approach that endows the store with personality.

The design for the store’s interior began with a study of the castle and the city ramparts to create a setting that evokes one of the main elements of the rich historical heritage of Guimarães. And so, the proportion of the interior spaces was organized by structural elements made of electro-welded wire mesh, which uses the interplay of certain geometric patterns to amplify the store’s interior space.

The starting point is a single element: the medieval battlement. This element, which tops off the walls of the city’s ramparts and towers has a clearly recognizable geometric pattern, which has been transformed into something incorporeal, placed in a different setting, and reinvented in folds of electro-welded mesh made of galvanized steel. Immaterial and permeable, this new battlement is transparent, and its wire surface reflects light, which transforms it into an ethereal element, devoid of inert stone. This element, considered in and of itself, is an emblem that also serves as a display case with multiple configurations: shoe display, accessory display, clothing display or even a mounting for mirrors. It repeatedly appears along the entire perimeter, providing a continuous background perspective for the entire interior, like a new, almost virtual, rampart inside the store; a complex maze of interwoven metallic grids full of transparencies, glazing, and depths.

Once this great virtual rampart has been created and its weight and material have been erased, it is filled along its entire length in an uneven manner with local granite stone. Twenty-three tons of gray granite, crushed into gravel with particle size between thirty and sixty millimeters. When the gravel is added, the rampart serves as gabions that enclose a pseudo-ruin, collapsed walls that capture a specific fictional moment in the history of this new rampart.

The front counter consists of two large granite blocks. These were extracted directly from the quarry, and the large grooves left by the shovels of the excavators have been highlighted. These blocks were carved manually to expose the glass and stainless steel compartment that will hold the small accessories.

All the structural details, fasteners, fittings and accessories are designed to streamline the process of setting up the store itself and of placement and arrangement of the display. Other secondary elements (benches, fitting room…) lend personality to the space and help to underscore the scenography created.