Nanowo

Interior design 2020 | Retail store in Warsaw’s new shopping mall Elektrownia Powiśle – design template for Nanowo – a new brand of refurbished electronics | Team: Jan Strumiłło, Julia Jankowska, Jakub Jezierski | Photography by Jakub Certowicz

From the outset we decided to let our design tell the story of refurbished electronic goods. We focused on supporting the key message: refurbished means environmentally friendly and thus more attractive than new – free of excess packaging and cheaper, without compromising quality. We deliberately referenced factory and workshop interiors to strengthen associations with industry. As a result many elements of the interior will be easy to reuse or repurpose in the future. The original idea survived construction and keeps the built store together.

The store was meant to look as a work in progress in order to make customers feel as if they were on a building site or in an artist’s atelier. The high-tech elegant products stand out against solid backdrops – boards of various textures and sizes, casually leaning against unfinished walls. Common building materials counterpoint utter luxury. Plasterboards, oriented strand boards, ceramic blocks stand right next to slabs of finest marble, hypnotizing veneers, mirrors. Smartphones and computers on sale only touch the beautiful surfaces, but the tops lay on rough pinewood trestles and bare clay blocks. Instead of concealing power supply we let it hang from the ceiling in thick signal orange cable coils. Working on a tight schedule we took ready-made tool racks, had them repainted in colours of our choice and filled with boxes to make an abstract sculptural chiaroscuro product wall.

The long and slender venue offered ideal space for large lightboxes with product photos. We were lucky because Nanowo granted us the opportunity to invite the photographer of our choice – Jan Smaga – to travel to the factory and shoot the refurbishment process where it is actually taking place. His photos are more artpieces than packshots and this is exactly the effect that we sought.

Rectangles of intense colour divide the shop floor into abstract zones akin to value-chain markings ubiquitous in industrial spaces. The store design would not be complete without Jakub Jezierski‘s branding. We teamed up with him to tailor a space for a brand and a brand for a space.