Retail Design – Topshop & Guests London

The Halo Group specialises in commercial interior, hospitality, office and architectural design. This week’s blog features a behind the scenes look at an exciting retail design project for Topshop. 

The Topshop & Guests retail design project saw a collaboration between The Halo Group, leading commercial interior design agency Your Studio & Tristan Cochrane, a multidiscipline fabricator specialising in bespoke props, design, production and brand work.

Working together, we secured the contract before deciding on the division of labour to complete the job with Your Studio representing the client, Tristan’s team leading the installation & The Halo Group facilitating the operations. The job is testament to the close knit network of partners and specialist suppliers The Halo Group has at its disposal. We have worked with Tristan and his team on many different projects and it was a pleasure to collaborate with the guys over at Your Studio for the first time. The resultant dynamic has helped strengthen our offering to our clients where we are able to offer a turnkey solution for many of their projects.

It was decided early in the process that OSB (Orientated Strand Board) would be the ideal material to use for this project. Despite being a popular material for retail design for some time, OSB is still very much on trend in London, it’s cost effective and is aesthetically very appealing with its textured patterning created from its manufacturing process where boards are formed by adding adhesives and then compressing layers of wood strands (flakes) in specific orientations.

Tristan is experienced in working with OSB and has undertaken multiple similar projects, using it throughout 2016 on various activations including a refit for men’s fashion designer Kestin Hare. His knowledge of the selected material was a key component to successfully achieving the end result within both a tight prefabrication window and even tighter overnight build schedule. Tristan and his team used a range of techniques to create the end result with carpentry, craftsmanship, CNC cutting and metal work all being central features in the project. The only element that was outsourced due to the tight lead time was the specialist acrylic boxes which formed the product displays.

One of the biggest challenges during the production process was working with the chip foam. Chip foam is formed by taking offcuts of foam, chipping them up and then gluing them back together using high pressure machinery. The end result is a high density reconstituted product. It’s heavy, non uniform and unstable as a building material and the team had to find a way to accurately cut the “&GUESTS” logo into it in the right position.  After a lot of testing, a stencil was cut in 18mm MDF with the CNC machine and then used to copy the letters into the foam once the back wall had been fully built.

The Topshop & Guests retail design collaboration between The Halo Group Your Studio and Tristan Cochrane was a huge success. For more information on The Halo Group’s services call 0207 870 3210 or email ali@www.thehalogroup.co.uk