Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

The shop floor of the department store has
increasingly become a cluttered no-man’sland,
no more than a space between
competing branded concessions.
Howard Watson describes how at Lotte, a
department store in Seoul, South Korea,
Universal Design Studio has applied its
subtle decorative design style – first
launched internationally in the Stella
McCartney stores – to unifying effect.
Following the acclaim of the Stella McCartney store designs,
London-based Universal Design Studio was approached by
Lotte to help redesign the interiors of its five-storey
department store in the Myeongdong district of Seoul, South
Korea. At the same time as understanding that a modern-day,
upmarket department store must compete with boutiques
while offering its own cohesive, curated and branded
experience, the practice addressed one of the major problems
that have long compromised department store interiors: how
to explore the drama of a large space while resisting the
visual monotony that beleaguers the genre and makes it the
poor cousin of fashion retail design.
The collaboration with Lotte began in 2005 with the
commission to redesign just half of the 1,000-square-metre
(10,764-square-foot) fifth floor, but Universal’s success in
introducing a type of retail experience quite foreign to Korean
fashionistas has led to the redesign of the third floor,
completed in winter 2006, followed by the second half of the
fifth floor, which is due for completion in spring 2007 and will
include a café/restaurant area.
Fashion retail in Seoul is very brand led and, previously,
Lotte had followed the established template of dividing the
department store into brand-orientated boxes. The
operations of Lotte are so diverse – it is as famous for its
mineral water as it is for selling clothes – that it is virtually
a ‘non-brand’: in contrast to Virgin, it successfully traverses
genres by stepping back from a forceful, cross-sector identity.
Consequently, the department store had little identity
beyond the franchises it housed, and this suited the local
retail mindset: wealthy Seoul shoppers expect branded
boutiques rather than a desegregated, multibrand experience
where they can graze. Unusually in an era where the
motivation of much high-profile retail design is to create
individual pockets of experience as a reaction against the
homogenous whole, Universal Design Studio needed to
break down the barriers and extend some idea of
The design of the luxury accessories section on the third floor, completed
in 2006, is highly geometric, with almost all elements based on a
triangular form. The Corian shoe displays tilt up towards the customers.