Projects
We don’t actually design interiors.
On brands, people and the question of how an idea becomes a place.
When we talk about brands, we surprisingly rarely talk about spaces.
We talk about logos, colours, typography, websites or social media. Yet the most authentic encounter with a brand often happens somewhere else entirely. In a hotel. In a restaurant. In a hair salon. In a Pilates studio. Wherever people do not just look at something but step into a place.
Over the past few years I have noticed more and more often that this is exactly where a brand becomes credible – or does not. Of course, as designers we design spaces. We develop floor plans, choose materials, plan light and think about how things flow. We solve countless functional details and spend hours finding the right proportions or the right shade of colour.
But if I am honest, that never feels like the real core of my work. It feels much more as if we were trying to make something invisible visible. We are trying to give a company a space.
A few months ago we had the pleasure of designing Tina’s new salon. The brief was never simply to design a beautiful hair salon. There are plenty of those. We wanted to create a place that feels like Tina.
Like her modern aesthetic. Her love of craft. Her effortless coolness. And like that particular mix of precision and lightness that makes people trust her at once.
Of course the salon had to work. Mirrors, workstations, storage, light, products, circulation – all of this belongs to a good hair salon. But the more interesting question was a different one.
How do you translate a person and her business into a space?
How do you create a place that does not feel like any salon, but like a natural extension of the person who created it? People may not remember the wall colour later. Or which light hung above the mirror. They may not even know exactly why they felt at ease there. But they remember how a place felt.
Whether it was authentic. Whether it was coherent. Whether what the business promised could actually be felt. And perhaps that is the most beautiful form of branding. Not a logo you recognise. But a place you experience.
A design, however, is only ever the beginning. How good a project turns out is decided not only at the drawing board but above all in its execution. Materials have to be chosen with care, details carried through consistently, and countless decisions made on site.
Tina accompanied this process with remarkable clarity. She was the kind of client you can only wish for: decisive, precise and with a fine sense of when it pays to hold on to an idea – and when it does not.
That the salon today feels exactly as we imagined it at the start is therefore not only the result of our design, but above all of her consistent and incredibly careful execution.
Thank you for the fabulous images © Marla Pilz
