Salon seductive: A designer boutique with two faces

Amsterdam – NL=New Luxury; it is also the theme and the name behind EventArchitectuur’s new men’s and women’s store for designers Alexander van Slobbe and Francisco van Benthum. Playing on themes of yin and yang, black and white, male and female, NL=New Luxury is really two stores cannily dovetailed into one. The MDF fittings and sliced-up hanging rails on the ground floor are painted black, while those in van Slobbe’s womenswear salon upstairs are stained white.

These thin-slice, rectilinear displays, part shelving, part archival storage cupboards, unify both floors. They also break each one down into abstract, gallery-style rooms that create the store’s overall sense of serenity and coolness. Although light and shade dominate as the binding forces that hold both floors together, according to architect Paul Kuipers, it is the use of simple materials plus the long vertical plane of lines and the clothes that ‘bookmark’ them that hold the overall visual narrative together.