A London furniture showroom that brings Vivense’s values of quality, pedigree and craft to life, and sets the design standard for future stores.InsideUKWork
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Vivense makes high-quality furniture and homewares that are intended to be treasured as part of their owners’ lives. They offer well-crafted objects with a mid-century pedigree but a contemporary palette.
![](https://hapticarchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Hapticarch_Vivense_Existing-site-visit-930x698.jpg)
We were commissioned to design their first UK showroom in Southwark, south London, establishing a design recipe that could be applied to stores planned elsewhere in Europe.
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The showroom is part of an emerging cluster of furniture and design retailers in Southwark, an area with a strong tradition of making and manufacture.
Although most of Vivense’s customers will come to the showroom already knowing the brand, the design is intended to welcome the curious inside.
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Just as the products act as a backdrop to the lives of their owners, we designed the showroom as a calm, neutral setting against which objects can be displayed.
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The store occupies two units on the ground floor of a new residential block, so offered the opportunity to make something distinctive out of a purpose-built space.
The raw, 150-square-metre shell is wrapped in vertical timber slats which give subtle depth to the walls and bring the exposed ceiling down to a more intimate datum.
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The slats take a swooping curve to frame the showroom window and undulate out from the walls inside to loosely define a series of bays.
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To structure the space further, we created three monolithic black stands as focal points, each with a sawtooth footprint.
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We chose beech for the slatted envelope because of its sustainable qualities – the timber is sourced from Europe – and also its neutral character.
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The wood is light in colour yet warm in feel, and has few knots which would add unwelcome visual noise.
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Rather than creating living scenarios in each by, the objects are displayed free of the slatted walls so that customers can better imagine them in their own home.
![](https://hapticarchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Hapticarch_Vivense_Exploded-iso.jpg)
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The timber and black monolithic elements are set off by terrazzo flooring which has a limited colour palette but a richly aggregated texture.
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The large glass windows let in plenty of natural light but are highly reflective, so we collaborated with lighting specialists Atrium to install a large, circular ceiling light so that the products inside are sufficiently visible even on bright days.
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Made from LED fitting in a minimalist aluminium channel, the strong geometric shape ties into Vivense’s brand identity.
We worked with a talented subcontractor to install the joinery, a process complicated by the fact it was achieved during the Covid lockdown in spring 2020.
![](https://hapticarchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Hapticarch_Vivense_material-sample-study-930x1240.jpg)
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The slats are dowelled so that no fixings are visible, giving them a deceptively simple, crafted finish.
![](https://hapticarchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Hapticarch_Vivense_Terazzo-sample-material-study-930x930.jpg)
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The project typifies our approach to the making of small, highly crafted interior spaces, and our interest in collaboration – not just with the client, craftspeople and specialist suppliers, but also with the designers of Vivense’s visual identity.
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Since completing the Southwark showroom, we have designed a second Vivense store in Richmond, west London.
![](https://hapticarchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Hapticarch_Vivense_Plan-option-sketch-930x698.jpg)
Both stores represent the Haptic DNA in that they favour a simple palette, beautifully executed, and ingrained with a Scandinavian approach to design.
![](https://hapticarchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Hapticarch_Vivense_Internal-collage-930x523.jpg)