30 years after opening their first store in 1981 in
Barcelona, Camper now boasts 300 stores and 4,000 points of sale in over 50
countries.
The difference between Camper and other major brands though,
is that instead of designing a store identity that made all their shops
recognizably the same around the world, they hired different designers to make
each shop completely different and unique.
From opulent to minimalistic, stark tiles to flowery
upholstered walls, each Camper store becomes its own little jewel of design and
experimentation.
The following are a few of our favorites..
The New York Camper store in Soho designed by Shigeru Ban
and Dean Maltz is a diagonal design in a rectangular space, featuring one of the
best uses of Artek’s 10-unit system we've seen and a saavy hidden way of showing the
shoes.
A different approach is used in one of the London Camper
stores, designed by Tomas Alonso, where the shoes are laid directly into view,
and highlighted by the tile trompe-l’oeil in the background.
In addition to the tiles, the use of metal tubing throughout
the furniture and fixtures in the store give this design a certain quirkiness,
reminiscent of the 2D cube-based video games of our youth.
A completely different use of tiles is shown here in Alfredo
Haberli’s Barcelona shop, where red mosaic takes over the bottom half of the
front of the store (a cross between a metro station and a Gaudi building?),
only to lead the weary customer to an elevator-like lounge where one can sit on
a ‘Take-a-line-for-a-walk’ armchair designed by the same Haberli for Moroso and
try on shoes at their leisure.
Another Barcelona store, this one designed by Spanish
designer Jaime Hayon, takes the same color red in a very different direction,
with furniture that looks like it most certainly would have been adopted by a
French monarch named Louis, had there been any in the 21st
century.
Another opulent proposition is Tokujin Yoshioka’s design for
a London Camper store, which utilizes the same folded fabric technique on a
large wall panel, as in the Bouquet chair he designed for Moroso, also present
in the space.
In contrast, Nendo’s minimalist design for the Osaka store
focuses on nothing but the shoes themselves, by making the completely white
background (including wall, ceiling and floor) disappear and giving the shoes
the appearance of floating.
