Outlets peddling frozen yogurt are a familiar sight in the US, so much so that ‘froyo’ wars are breaking out, with competing brands such as Pinkberry and RedMango battling it out for high street and – more importantly – mall domination.
In the UK, Snog is being dubbed a pioneer. It’s the brainchild of Columbian architect Pablo Uribe and his American-born business partner Rob Baines. They know the US market well, and realised that as the UK’s trail-blazers they needed to make their mark, not just with their product, but with their design concept.
Rather than going to an established retail design agency, the duo entrusted their baby to a relative new boy. Architect Dominic Harris had done his time at Future Systems, Softroom and Jason Bruges, but this was his biggest commission to date, operating as one-year-old Cinimod Studio. Harris was introduced to Snog’s founders by the brand’s graphic design and branding agency, Ico Design (and so can’t be held responsible for the name).
While Harris cast his eye over the American froyo brands’ styling, he was under no obligation to mimic it. ‘My brief was to break the mould,’ he says. And of course, in the virgin territory of London, ‘there was no prescribed language, no particular aesthetic that we had to refer to here’, he adds.
Snog, I always saw it as being a key element in creating the “perpetual summer” environment,’ he says. He pulled this off with more than 3000 individually controllable LEDs behind a Barrisol stretched plastic ceiling. Onto this lightbox video surface appear digitally captured and manipulated clouds, whose colour and speed are determined by the time of day.
Harris believes it’s the first digital ceiling to be installed in the UK, adding: ‘LEDmedia surfaces are slowly becoming more popular in retail environments, but are still the preserve of expensive brands, such as the Armani store on Oxford Street, where they are used as a feature display.
‘With the Snog store, the digital sky has been fully integrated with the design from the earliest stages, and as such feels an intrinsic part of the store rather than a “promotional feature bolt-on”,’ he adds.
Harris’s interest in lighting was fostered during his studies. At the Bartlett School of Architecture, he was encouraged to look at things that run parallel with architecture, rather than ‘just forming spaces through physical objects’.
So his 20sq m solution is genuinely innovative and has virtually nothing in common with any cafe, bar or fastfood outlet out there. He pulls this off with a marriage of high design ideals with contemporary fixtures and fittings. Hence the Shitake mushroom white latticed stools by Marcel Wanders for Moroso, and the lawn vinyl flooring. But it’s the ceiling that is the pièce de resistance. ‘While the ceiling remains an ignored surface in most stores, Snog, I always saw it as being a key element in creating the “perpetual summer” environment,’ he says.
He pulled this off with more than 3000 individually controllable LEDs behind a Barrisol stretched plastic ceiling. Onto this lightbox video surface appear digitally captured and manipulated clouds, whose colour and speed are determined by the time of day.
Harris believes it’s the first digital ceiling to be installed in the UK, adding: ‘LED media surfaces are slowly becoming more popular in retail environments, but are still the preserve of expensive brands, such as the Armani store on Oxford Street, where they are used as a feature display.
‘With the Snog store, the digital sky has been fully integrated with the design from the earliest stages, and as such feels an intrinsic part of the store rather than a “promotional feature bolt-on”,’ he adds. Harris’s interest in lighting was fostered during his studies. At the Bartlett School of Architecture, he was encouraged to look at things that run parallel with architecture, rather than ‘just forming spaces through physical objects’.
The upshot is that Harris is big on lighting.
Snog, 32 Thurloe Place, South Kensington, London SW7 2HQ
www.ifancyasnog.com
Taken from the article "Chain Reaction", FX magazine, September 2008.
Words by Claire Dowdry
