Technology and design unite in the sculpture-boutique on Rue Saint Honoré

Piquadro flagship store in Paris, France; design KarimAzzabi;photoJean-Pierre Delagarde for Piquadro, all rights reserved. 

The French flagship store, located opposite the famous shop windows of Colette concept store – an obligatory stop for fashion victims from all over the world – has been designed as a large mono-material sculpture by architect Karim Azzabi, who also created the futuristic Piquadro headquarters near Bologna (Italy).

Azzabi has created the interiors – about 60 square metres – featuring a minimalist style based on the use of a single material, DuPont™ Corian®techno-surface, and a single colour, pure white. The store was conceived as an organic and homogeneous space reminiscent of a cocoon, creating an original display format that makes the showroom an exemplary model in the panorama of world store design. 

From the floor to the walls and ceiling – clients are welcomed in a white shroud-like shell made entirely of DuPont™ Corian®. Its main elements are the multi-functional strips in DuPont™ Corian® placed side by side and marked by thin vanishing lines. The strips

function as floor, walls, and also as display elements: shelves and drawers emerge from the “ribs” using the mouldability of DuPont™ Corian® to its full extent. The purity of this mono-coloured environment perfectly matches the modern and minimalistic style of the Piquadro products, creating a refined and immaculate atmosphere where only the essential is important.

DuPont™ Corian® techno-surface, one of the most versatile and innovative materials on the market, is a modern “man-made material”, characterized by an intrinsic and superior versatility, solidity, durability and hygiene, that provides ample possibilities for the development of interior design solutions of extremely high technical and aesthetic qualities. It can be easily combined with many other materials and technologies typically used for interior design, and its easy cleaning and renewing properties make it highly suitable for spaces with intense traffic like the Piquadro boutique in one of the Paris streets most visited by luxury shoppers.

In the new Piquadro store, the interior shell in DuPont™ Corian® also incorporates variable intensity LED lighting solutions, positioned horizontally and vertically, sometimes integrated in the walls, sometimes in the shelves and tables, other times in “stalactites” falling from

the ceiling, that provide a sense of depth to the rectangular space and delicately illuminate the collections on display.

The purchasing experience is enriched by the possibility of interacting with the showcased product through a special iPhone application that interfaces with the videowall in the store. Thanks to this software, made in collaboration with Vodafone, the sales assistants can show all the product’s characteristics on the videowall, other colour possibilities and quality tests by simply reading the barcode on the product with the smartphone.

“The opening of the Paris-Rue Saint Honoré boutique is an important strategic step for the internationalization of the Piquadro brand,” says Marco Palmieri, CEO of Piquadro. “The French capital is the main tourist destination world-wide and a Piquadro shop window in one of the most popular Paris streets for shopping is a fundamental step in the development of Piquadro’s fame globally. It is due to the importance of this store from the point of view of its image,” Palmieri continues, “that we wanted to create a new furnishing concept focusing on innovative materials and solutions.”