AMANDA WAKELEY STORE

Albemarle Street, London (2013)

Amanda Wakeley’s store in Mayfair is housed in a 17th-century Georgian house, a few meters from the Smithsonian’s Economist Building and Wren’s Saint James Church.

The initial operations were directed to discover the structure and the original spaces, heavily modified by the previous occupants. The spaces the store occupies correspond to the reception at street level and the living areas on the first floor (piano nobile) of the original house, which continued with three more floors of bedrooms. We find a clear spatial order and a structure of wood that after three hundred years continues to function perfectly.

In our intervention we keep this structure and the order and proportion of spaces, and superimpose, articulating them clearly, a series of elements such as a new fireplace or large doors that maintain a tension between the original domestic use and the new commercial use.