Surefoot Santa Monica
Santa Monica, California
2012, Completed
Santa Monica, California
2012, Completed
The LADG designed a 1,200 square-foot retail space for custom ski boot retailer Surefoot in Santa Monica. The design layers thin facades of retail display atop the existing white box interior space, providing a coherent retail environment for the Surefoot brand. The store in Santa Monica has three core elements. The first element is a curved dropped ceiling that hangs several feet below the structure of the building shell, as though a thick tent cloth has been draped loosely from above. The second is the custom shelving that is built into a thick plywood wrapper that covers two-thirds of the perimeter walls and has an irregular fit against the ceiling to create crevices, gaps, and awkward fits. The final element includes a seating bench and equipment for digitally scanning customers’ feet.
We were fascinated by the existing ranch house, particularly the way in which it evoked mid-century houses designed by Cliff May. Whether he meant to do so intentionally, or whether he simply didn’t understand his own proposals in three dimensions, May’s houses are remarkable because of the way walls and interior elements appear to float free on the ground plane, with little to no relationship to the roof above. We wondered if it would be possible to radicalize this as a proposition. Instead of designing new buildings, what if we designed a collection of freestanding walls that were only incidentally covered by roofs in places? What if the interiors were just the by-product of these walls assembled in sufficient density to make something like a room? Given this extreme looseness, could we turn the entire site into a series of rooms between our smattering of walls that stand alone and unconnected like a field of things?
Team
Troy Hillman, Dan Marty, Noah Rubin
