Repairing is a vast chapter and is present in most of our trend reports already. Today we’d love to share with you one of the latest projects by Norm Architects.

The studio has wholly redesigned the Notabene retail experience in Copenhagen, where shoe design and shoe care are unified. You see a retail design concept, a shoeshine bar and a creative lab in one spot, and that’s the new retail. It’s not about selling products but offering an experience that includes solutions, too.

“The intention to form a retail space resembling that of an artist’s atelier, combined with a simplified and stylized warehouse feeling is enhanced by the many freestanding plinths, displaying shoes as artwork in a versatile, yet harmonized, material palette.”

– Jonas Bjerre-Poulsen, Norm Architects

You can browse the store and discover the shoe collection but also pay a visit to the downstairs shoeshine bar with the possibility to give your favourite pair a brush up while enjoying a drink, with a pair of slippers to stay comfortable. Browsing through curated coffee table books is an extra perk.

Norm architects describe how carefully crafted by Japanese furniture brand Karimoku Case Study and local craftsmen alike, elegant furniture pieces accompany a monumental wooden staircase that sculpturally connects the three levels of the space while playfully letting in the sunlight through its oak structure. The material combination of elegant wooden details, lush bouclé fabrics, hand-brushed aluminium surfaces and rippled concrete creates an edgy universe that is both relaxed, refined, and luxurious at the same time.

Photography: Jonas Bjerre Poulsen and Karl Tranberg Knudsen