Aug 14
Slade Architecture has designed the first ever Barbie Store for Mattel.
This flagship store is the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of Barbie dolls and licensed Barbie products, as well as a range of services and activities for Barbie fans and their families.
Mattel wanted a store where ‘Barbie is hero’; expressing Barbie as a global lifestyle brand by building on the brand’s historical link to fashion. Barbie Shanghai is the first fully realized expression of this broader vision. Mattel worked with BIG, the branding and design division of Ogilvy & Mather, to develop the creative concept, identify a project location, explore featured activities and identify creative partners.
Slade Architecture led the design including the exterior, interior, fixtures, and furnishings. Slade’s design is a sleek, fun, unapologetically feminine interpretation of Barbie: past, present, and future.
For the new facade, Slade Architecture combined references to product packaging, decorative arts, fashion and architectural iconography to create a modern identity for the store, expressing Barbie’s cutting-edge fashion sense and history.
The facade is made of two layers: molded, translucent polycarbonate interior panels and flat exterior glass panels printed with a lattice frit pattern. Slade collaborated with designers at BIG, who created the final exterior frit graphics. The two layers reinforce each other visually and interact dynamically through reflection, shadow and distortion.
Visitors are enveloped by curvaceous, pearlescent surfaces of the lobby, leading to a pink escalator tube that takes them from the bustle of the street, to the double-height main floor.
The central feature is a three-story spiral staircase enclosed by eight hundred Barbie dolls. The staircase and the dolls are the core of the store; everything literally revolves around Barbie.
The staircase links the three retail floors:
The women’s floor (women’s fashion, couture, cosmetics and accessories).
The doll floor (dolls, designer doll gallery, doll accessories, books). The Barbie Design Center, where girls design their own Barbie is on this floor. This activity was planned by Chute Gerdeman Retail and designed by Slade Architecture.
The girls floor (girls fashion, shoes and accessories). The Barbie Fashion Stage, planned and designed by Chute Gerdeman Retail, where girls take part in a real runway show, is also on this floor.
•The Barbie Cafe, a beautiful restaurant and gelato bar on the top floor, offers guests the opportunity to take a break and enjoy both local comfort food and Barbie-inspired refreshments. Mattel and David Laris Concept planned both the Fashion Cafe and the Barbie Cafйe. Both spaces were designed by Slade Architecture.
Throughout the retail areas, Slade played with the scale differences between dolls, girls and women. They reinforced the feeling of youth and the possibilities of an unapologetically girlish outlook (regardless of age) by mixing reality and fantasy and keeping play and fun at the forefront - to create a space where optimism and possibility reign supreme as expressions of core Barbie attributes.
Architect/Interior Designer: Slade Architecture
Location: Shanghai, China
Client: Mattel
Architect of Record: AD Incorporated (China) Ltd (Danial McCahon)
Store Concept Development and Creative Direction: BIG/ Ogilvy & Mather
Activities (Fashion Runway and Barbie Design Center Activities):Chute Gerdeman
Retail Consultant:Vertical Retail Consulting (Formerly KSA Shanghai)
Restaurant Consultant: David Laris, Founder. David Laris Creates
Graphics: BIG/ Ogilvy & Mather (façade frit pattern)
MEP Engineer: Scott Wilson LTD
Structural Engineer: Scott Wilson LTD
Lighting consultant: Radiance Lightworks
General Contractor: EDG
Furniture Fabricator: Strads Design Co, LTD
Fixtures vendor/fabricator: Kingsmen
Woodwork:EDG
Façade Supplier/Installer: King Glass Engineering Co, LTD
Construction area: 2,790 sqm
Completion: 2009
Photographs: Iwan Baan
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