The new Vein Shoe Store has opened in Brisbane's CBD. The store is located at 117 Adelaide Street and forms part of the Brisbane Arcade Building. We asked Store Concept Designer, Chris Worfold to talk through the design:
"The idea from the start was to create a space that was more like an artist's studio than a shop. Instead of glass, chrome, plastic and chipboard, there are welcoming deep leather chesterfields, warm planked timber walls, weathered pre-war doors, ornate sculptures and hand-made shoe lasts. There is a history in everything here.
It’s an eclectic bohemia. It’s a very personal response opposing the more obvious, homogenized and overtly branded commercial spaces. There has to be a letting go of all that control if you want something different. And we wanted there to be something more human and creative to the space not just all brand and product. We were aiming for something individualized and unique, not overly polished or finished but something that was more of an adventure.
Using a kind of anti-aesthetic is expansive for me. In this project we used things, materials and textures that I have a personal connection to. I wasn’t asked or expected to toe the line to the modern commercial aesthetic. I think that’s why Chris and Szuting (McCullum) wanted to work with an artist rather than an interior designer. I don’t think they wanted the easy answers. I think they wanted do something that was really a reversal of a standard shop-fit, something where idiosyncrasy reigns.
It's really a classical design language we’ve used though, wood, leather, velvet, mirror, glass but its all put together in the casual way like an artist might move things around in their studio. It's meant to evoke a way of living and creating, having a sense of romanticism and imagination about what is and what could be.
The tree root chandeliers are really a signature piece for me. We live on acreage just outside of Brisbane and there is a small gorge at the bottom of the property where the trees’ roots get exposed and eventually they come down. I’ve been experimenting with these tree roots in sculptures for over a decade. It’s the life of the tree that you never see, the underworld. And here we are literally lighting that up and thinking about the natural world and its organic process in that heart of the city.
About half the timber we used in the store was sourced from my Grandfather’s old house. A lot of the planks were the fence rails I grew up learning to balance and pretending to walk the tightrope on. You can’t buy new cuts of this quality timber anymore, it just isn’t available. They are beautiful hard wood planks, so dense you can feel the life of the tree in them; it’s mass, its fight against gravity, its stand in the world. We tried to remain true to the previous life of the timber, no repainting just cleaning, sanding and sealing it.
The doors are all solid core and prewar sourced from salvage yards. They are our metaphors for choice and change. For me they are connected to all sorts of memories, fairy tales, fantasies and ghost stories, from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ through to ‘The Shining’. Doors are the threshold to new experience. In the neighborhoods I have lived in there have always been haunted houses and those houses have always been full of old wooden doors like this, each one leading to a different and new world of horded treasures and detritus, the magical artifacts of a life once lived.
It is this haunting, magical and glamorous experience I wanted to tap into for the New Vein CBD store. It represents our creativity and idiosyncrasy. It’s not a space for the perfect or the static but a place to explore and to change."
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