Mellow yellow

Architectural Review, The, July, 1997 by Penny McGuire

Marithee and Francois Girbaud's new clothes shop is an elegant addition to Rue Etienne Marcel, one of the smartest shopping streets in Paris. Designed by Kristian Gavoille, the shop seems from outside to be an airy void of light and colour set into the dense city fabric. If you consider the scheme simply from the point of view of planning controls, it is a somewhat surprising intrusion, because its glazed facade, three bays wide and high, takes up a full three storeys of its nineteenth-century host. Gavoille himself likens the shop to a lung, a means of breathing freely in the familiar mixture of congestion and orderliness that is Paris.

Diaphanous white hangings (PVC sheets hung from wall mounted rails) creatively lit on both sides are used to screen the interior from the street and to cast a pearly light over the front part of the shop. Where the screens are drawn, you can see from outside the thin trace of a staircase as it zigzags through luminous gold-coloured space throwing shadows against the patterns of light generated inside.

The plan is wedge-shaped with the oblique following the line of the street so that the shop is set asymmetrically to it. Gavoille has made a virtue of necessity by filling the incredibly sharp-angled corner with the equally sharp angles of his spidery staircase. Behind the facade, the architect has deployed lighting and colour to indicate depth - colour becomes more intense and light softer as you move away from the street into the interior - and coved edges, furniture and fittings to blur corners and carve out the spaces on each level.

In general, the various fittings for displaying clothes line the peripheries of the shop, in places they zigzag origami fashion so that the sides form reflective plates. These imprinted with images and allied with the reflective walls of changing rooms contribute to the dematerialisation of space.

Gavoille's monumentally inclined furniture has become familiar from exhibitions of works by Neotu, the firm that manufactures many of his designs. The handsomely proportioned furniture here has been specially designed for the Girbauds and, mostly made by Neotu (Techno-Legno made the metal hanging systems), includes a wood and glass desk, again for displaying clothes, curving wooden cash desks and a number of curvilinear seats. A leather-covered chaise longue of colonial proportions presumably provides respite from the exhausting business of spending money.

If the plan is awkwardly shaped, so is the section. It is sharply indented at first floor level as space is lost to the rest of the building. On the first and second floors, the shop has to skirt the enclosing walls of an existing central staircase which has become part of a means of escape. A square void at first floor level, lined by a glass balustrade enlivens the innermost corner and provides a visual connection with the ground floor.

Colours are particularly pleasing. Luminous cream and white give way to warmer yellow as you go further into the interior; flashes of blue and green are provided by the small movable boxes like nesting boxes for small garments pegged into the surface of the walls around the staircase. The floor is composed of poured resin with sections of an old oak tree trunk embedded into it. The architect, who exhibits metaphysical leanings, explains that this is to remind people of their terrestrial roots; the ambience is intended to provide spiritual nourishment.

Architect Kristian Gavoille Architecte

Project architect Kristian Gavoille, Valerie Garcia

Wall/ceiling Societe Normalu

Floor Societe Boulanger

Lighting iGuzzini

Photographs Luc Boegi/Archipress