Tag Heuer showroom | Ottavio Di Blasi

The design of the Tag Heuer’s showroom gave us the occasion to redesign the whole facade of a narrow building in the center of Sydney: one of the few remaining buildings dated from the beginning of the last century. The location is King Street, one of the trendiest and most central shopping streets. The small size of the building, with a width of only 4,20 meters on three floors, tends to disappear compared to the huge size of the modern skyscrapers nearby, and the loud voice of the commercial advertising. The key idea of the project was using a stainless steel mesh as a false suspended ceiling with a curved shape, which does not stop at the window as usual. Instead, the mesh comes out of the shop, continuing its curved movement on the facade toward the sky. For this reason, despite the very small size of the showroom the shop looks very visible from the outside, which gives it a strong character. The mesh appears like a kind of translucent screen that, according to the different skylight conditions, changes its transparency. In some hours of the day, when the sun shines directly on it, the building appears like a down scaled “skyscraper” all made of reflecting steel, and the old facade is completely hidden. In some other hours, in the shade, the mesh becomes very transparent, allowing the view of the “old” facade behind it. In order to get into the showroom, you walk on a small bridge that passes over the underground shopping area, allowing the view and the natural light to get in, so that from the outside you can see the underground level actually reconverted into a shopping area. The other levels of the building are devoted to the company office facilities.