Malin+Goetz Montana Avenue
Santa Monica, California
Completed 2016
Design Team
Brian Messana, Toby O’Rorke, Viktor Nassli, Juan Espinosa, Antonio Torrero Venzala, Margot Robier
Collaborators
Executive Architect: VMC
Lighting Designer: Zerolux
The founders of Malin+Goetz want their shops to authentically connect with every location and to feel like an intimate space for their clients. As opposed to cookie-cutter stores, they love combining old with new and embracing a site’s unique character and idiosyncrasies. Their new shop on Santa Monica’s Montana Avenue was a charming, semi-detached cottage but much larger than other locations. We programmed the back third of the store for storage, office and bathroom, creating a long, rectilinear main floor. To avoid triggering need for a permit or seismic engineer, we did not touch the walls and redesigned the space solely via furnishings and finishings.
To pull customers into the deep, open room, we conceived a striking back wall with two immense, floor-to-ceiling, veined white marble slabs flanking an equally tall door covered in a graded reflective mirror. Otherwise, we kept the interior simple, visually balancing a long point-of-sales-and-tryout station opposite nine custom, wood shelving fixtures to allow three units for each product collection. To make the distinctive M+G white packaging pop, we painted the wood black and aligned the shelving in succession with four-inch breaks. Wall-mounted fluorescent tube lights behind and between the fixtures cast light through the gaps—a nod to the work of Donald Judd and also the film 2001:Space Odyssey—imposing an ordered rhythm and graphic intensity to the visual merchandising. Reclaimed oak on the front of the sales/tryout station looks contemporary but connects with the past, and the smooth, white marble countertop is clean and clinical. New oak flooring and pristine white walls impart a Southern California ease. In the front windows, utilitarian wooden blocks in reclaimed oak display product and catch the attention of passers-by.
Behind the sales desk, a large photograph of Mr. Greenberg, the owner of the retail site’s pug, is hung in homage to the location’s earlier incarnation as a pet grooming salon.
Photographs by Eric Laignel