Christian Louboutin BKK

Having worked on Louboutin's Mumbai store interiors in the capacity of a Local Architect, we were commissioned a few months later as the Design Architect for their first retail space in Thailand.

Located within Bangkok's Central Embassy Mall, which was still under construction at the time, the site offered 1100 square feet of linear space. Our immediate response to its elongated structure was to break the linearity by dividing it into three distinct rooms, each catering to a different category of products offered by the brand -- ladies' footwear, handbags and leather accessories and men's footwear.

Globally, Louboutin employs different designers for each retail space, allowing for varying aesthetics underlined by a few of their signature elements. For the Bangkok boutique, we aspired to a strong visual language, merging French elements with influences from Thailand, particularly since this was the label's first store in the country. Mr. Louboutin takes immense pride in handcraft, and so it was only natural that we incorporate the same in our design process. For most of the materials, we worked with different artisans across India to create bespoke wall finishes, which were shipped across for the final fitout.

The walls are defined with typical French mouldings and archways throughout. Within the first room, which houses the ladies' footwear collection, we incorporated Louboutin's signature arched niches, present in all the brand’s branches globally as a tribute to their first store in Paris. Another trademark touch, both conspicuous and synonymous with the label's Red Sole, is the red carpet.

The second room, the jewelled room, is for small leather goods and handbags. Extensive tikri (a technique native to Udaipur, of blowing glass and lining it with mercury to create a mirror finish; we had the glass hand-cut into convex fish scale pieces and put together mosaic-style on a board), adorns one wall in its entirety. The cash desk here references the glossy ceramic tiles used in traditional Thai architecture, its body created using copper sequins hand-embroidered onto a linen base and wrapped around MDF panels. The wall opposite features a larger fishscale motif in plaster, surrounded by leather tiles with metallic hand embroidery, each carrying patterns referencing French gardens.

The final room in the rear of the store, the men's room, uses leather tiles which are block-printed and hand-embroidered with local Thai Sak Yant tattoo designs serving as a backdrop for the footwear displays. This tattooed theme is in keeping with the label's Tattoo Parlour, a personalised service customers can avail of to get their body art traced and replicated onto bespoke shoes. The central wall in this section is clad with miniature 3D marble tiles, each painstakingly hand-cut by Jaipur artisans, which come together as part of a larger geometric motif; it is the same stone cladding in white marble used on the store's exterior façade, which tends to draw attention with its luminous play on shadow and light.