FrontRunners West Hollywood
Location: West Hollywood, CA
Year: 2014
Status: Complete
Frontrunners is a running shoe and apparel store in West Hollywood, California, which opened spring of 2014 as part of a new West Coast store roll-out under the parent company Surefoot.The client approached us with a paradoxical request: give us more wall space without making more walls. For LADG, this became the impetus for a series of studies in super-scaled furniture that turned conventional architectural elements into a series of free-standing objects that could be programmed and used on all sides.
Even the existing walls of the white box space were treated in this way by lining them in thick wooden performative wallpaper that can accept hanging racks and pegs in almost any location using a custom-fabricated slot wall system that was designed to look like decorative tracery. The partial-height ribbons are laid across the retail floor, like snakes. The ribbons bend so that no two surfaces in the store are exactly parallel. Each is detailed to reinforce separation and a sense of loose zoning, so that the program of “shoe sales” holds together as a kind of room-within-a-room, even though there are no hard partitions that separate it from its surroundings.
Project Lead: Noah Rubin
Project Team: Dan Marty