2014 BOY Winner: Food Retail
Recipes from this French purveyor go back several centuries—from chocolate to mille-feuille. Thoroughly modernizing history, the latest of 34 shops outside Paris is a spectacular Hong Kong location by Interior Design Hall of Fame members George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg. It’s on the mainland side, in the city’s largest mall.
The 2,900-square-foot sequence of function zones starts with 970 square feet of retail. (Next come a café, formal dining, and a room for private events.) An array of macaroons is immediately visible to customers as soon as they pass an oversize security gate that abstracts a hand-drawn map of Paris, circa 1800, in three layers of brass.
Brass also frames the glass tops of the Carrara marble display cases, while serpentine brass shelves are glamorously up-lit. To underscore a feeling of permanence, marble furthermore clads the walls, even the curved ones. On the floor, two different types of marble alternate to create trompe l’oeil hexagons that flow, uninterrupted, into the cheese room.
Project Team: Johnathan Garrison; Tara Browne; Anson Lee; Joyce Mou; Ali Mikkawi; Chris French; Bahar Ghaemi; Dylan Mckinnon; Crawford Noble.
