The ‘Leisure Centre’ Concept Store in Vancouver is a multi-brand avant-garde fashion store arranged over two floors incorporating a bookshop, tonic bar, lifestyle products and private shopping area. CMK’s approach highlighted the strong structural grid of columns and ceiling beams of the original art deco building and its beautiful concrete floor with the building’s history inscribed on its surface, with new materials and rigorous geometries introduced.

Spatially, the intervention inserted free-standing walls clad in raw, unfinished aluminium, rotated at 45^° against the existing grid. The walls come alive with subtle reflections of the colours of clothes, the interior, trees and sky outside, people occupying the space. The rotation and the use of mirrors set within the aluminium surfaces enhances this effect.

On the lower floor strategies were reversed and materials changed. All furniture was custom designed.