DeMellier’s first flagship store on Sloane Square, marks a defining new chapter for the London-born handbag brand, the 300-square-metre space, conceived by Nicolas Schuybroek, brings the world of DeMellier to life physically for the first time.

The Sloane Square flagship is less a store than as a sequence of inhabited rooms. The ambition was to create the intimacy of a private interior while retaining the clarity and permanence of architecture. Rather than constructing a neutral backdrop for leathergoods, the project brings together stone, timber, plaster, linnens, furniture, art and light to form a tactile landscape in which the collection can live. Bags appear within niches, on shelves and pieces of furniture almost as collected objects, discovered gradually as one moves through the space. The architecture is deliberately restrained: a limited family of materials establishes continuity, while subtle shifts in scale, texture, light and proportion give individual rooms their character. Monumental surfaces coexist with domestic elements: a chair, a rug, a lamp, a stack of books. It is through these contrasts, between weight and softness, precision and irregularity, permanence and intimacy, that the atmosphere of the store emerges.

More than recreating the image of a home, we were interested in reproducing its sense of familiarity: the feeling that objects have found their place over time. The result is conceived not simply as a setting for retail, but as an interior to inhabit: warm, tactile and quiet, where the architecture and the collection become part of the same domestic landscape.