Joseph stores – illuminating retail
In the early 1970s a young, ambitious entrepreneur and fashion enthusiast called Joseph Ettedgui had opened his first retail outlet in London’s Sloane Street. The store had been designed by architect Norman Foster, who had instilled in Ettedgui a sense of the importance of architecture.
Later, Ettedgui met architect Eva Jiricna and asked her to begin working on the design of a number of small shops, with the pair striving to offer a new, Modernist retail experience.
Idea
Jiricna’s interest lay in the careful use of natural materials, such as steel, glass, wood and stone. But it was glass, and more specifically light, which would set her work for Joseph apart from earlier retail design standards. She used glass in Joseph stores as a structural and decorative material to optimise transparency and bring daylight deep into the plan of the stores.
Lightness, transparency and appropriate use of materials have since become hallmarks of Jiricna’s approach and in many ways her work on the Joseph retail interiors launched this career-defining style. Using this approach Jiricna effectively recast interior design as architecture. She used the interiors not as a dominant presence but as a backdrop for a retail ‘play’, pre-echoing notions of ‘retail theatre’ used by store designers today.
Jiricna’s close collaboration with builders, carpenters, joiners and other specialists was crucially important in achieving the precision and detail found in the completed Joseph stores.
Impact
Jiricna’s work for Joseph was immediately picked up by architectural and fashion publications, which gave positive coverage of the stores and helpful exposure for their designer. As well as being appreciated immediately, over time Ettedgui has been judged as the ‘creator of modern retail’ and much of this legacy is due to the presentation and detailing of his stores.
Jiricna continued to work on the Joseph stores throughout the 1980s, creating the Fulham Road flagship in 1988 and a Sloane Street outlet in 1989. According to Tony Chapman, head of awards for the RIBA, Jiricna ‘made light a marketing tool and a friend of the retailer instead of an enemy. Her shops changed the ways in which clients commission or refit premises and how other architects respond to those [kinds of] briefs.’
In 1989 the Fulham Road store won the NAS Retail Award & Design Prize and in 1990 the Sloane Street outlet won first place in the retail category of the Interior Magazine Awards and Design Week Awards.
Joseph's Sloane Street and Draycott stores