DDi - March 2011 - (Page 92)

92 | Right Light Adventure in Milan Napapijri is an elegantly lit museum setting for serious outdoor apparel By Vilma Barr N Top left: At Napapijri’s Milan store mock crocodiles establish the adventure theme. Bottom left: A 14-ft.diameter globe hovers above a sunken seating and display area, with daylighting entering the interior from an angled skylight. Top right: Graduated circular plastic rings create teardrop-shape ceiling fixtures. apapijri, the Finnish word for the Arctic polar circle, alludes to the early North Pole explorations of the early part of the last century. Founded in the early 1990s in Italy and now headquartered in Lugano, Switzerland, the outdoor apparel and bag brand was sold in 2004 to VF Intl., a $7.6 billion multibrand holding company based in Greensboro, N.C. Discovery is the theme for the Napapijri Gallery Store in Milan at Via Manzoni 34. Designed by Milan-based architects De Carlo Gualla, the 4,800-sq.-ft. store exhibits photography and works of art from around the world on a rotating schedule. “With the space’s high ceilings and open floor spaces, the lighting for both the art and product displays had to be balanced to combine a shopping experience with a museum-like approach,” says Jacobo De Carlo, principal, De Carlo Gualla. A walkway runs along the entire length of the shop, leading visitors on a path around the store to examine the art and displayed merchandise. Paintings and photographs are lit with trackmounted luminaires, fitted with 75-watt QR111 lamps, supported in a channel within the suspended ceiling. The architects collaborated with Italian fixture maker iGuzzini to supply the luminaires and lamps. Above the entrance are two color-changing, ceiling-hung cubes of Barrisol, stretched taught over wire frames. “They also function as screens for travel scenes beamed from a mounted video projector,” De Carlo points out. The cubes accommodate three different systems: compact fluorescent RGB units for backlighting; a set of programmed projectors to change the color of the cubes and show the images visible on the outside surface; and emergency lighting. Poised above the center of the main floor is a 14-ft.-diameter glistening globe. It hovers above a sunken seating and display area, with daylighting entering the interior from an angled skylight extending from the ceiling to the top of the paneled wall for the art display. Vertically recessed into the suspended ceiling are modular adjustable luminaires with 70-watt metal halide lamps that sparkle off the globe’s surface. Men’s, women’s and children’s apparel and accessories collections are illuminated by recessed downlights, combining 70-watt CDMR111 and 75-watt QR111 light sources for color balance. “To give scale to the hanging and folded merchandise on display, we created several room-size spaces and used color for the walls and ceiling to enliven the product displays, which are primarily solids and neutral to dark tones,” De Carlo explains. “Napapijri represents adventure,” he indicates. Here, the designer’s role was to translate the client’s objective to communicate a mood of discovery—part museum, part entertainment, part retail store—in a space where both the lighting and visitor would play an interactive role. To e-mail this article, visit www.ddionline.com/magazine. | March 2011 www.ddionline.com Photos: Germano Borrelli http://www.ddionline.com/magazine http://www.ddionline.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of DDi - March 2011

DDi - March 2011
Contents
From the Editor
Newsworthy
Shopper Insights
Greentailing
Editor's Choice
Design Snapshot: Kusmi
Design Snapshot: Avril
Channel Focus: Toy Store
Longo’s
Brown Thomas
11 Retail Trends for 2011
Bloomingdale’s
The Exchange
Lola
White Castle
Design Leaders 2011
GlobalShop
Show Coverage
Right Light
In-Store Technology
Product Spotlight
Classifieds
Calendar
Advertisers
Shopping With Paco

DDi - March 2011