Polish Design Season: Warsaw designer Marcin Kwietowicz has completed the interior of a perfume shop in Warsaw.
The project, called Galilu Olfactory Perfumery, aims to create a luxurious atmosphere where shopping is "just an option".
Glass shelves encased in wood-panelled walls line the sides of the shop, with seating, a table and decorative lighting occupying the centre of the space.
To make the perfumery feel less like a pressurised shopping experience, the till is kept out of sight in a cupboard.
Storage is integrated into the walls and there is a wooden parquet floor.
Photos are by Jan Smaga.
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Here's some information from Marcin Kwietowicz:
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Galilu Olfactory – space and time
Large glass separates the street from the perfumery.
Little, but lofty, beautifully proportional space became an excuse to create a venue, where shopping is just an option. Centrally placed table with a chandelier just above, a comfy sofa, a wooden parquet, flowers, books, sounds and scents – it all makes us feel rather like in a huge living room, than in a shop.
Furniture, although in contemporary style, seem a bit random, misfit on purpose – they do not create a set, but an eclectic collection of items, gathered culturally, but without excess attention, as if accumulated throughout generations.
It is an effort to create a world that would exist in Warsaw, had it not been for some maelstroms of history.
It is a search for the city’s continuity.
The time did not stop here, it just slowed down a bit – it’s calm here.
The chandelier dragonfly froze above the table.
Client can make his choices for a long time and the perfumes are sold here somewhat by the way.
That’s why you won’t find a cash register in here – it has been hidden in a deep wardrobe looking like a neoplasticistic painting.
This makes the least pleasant moment of shopping become a jolly mystery – a surprise of exploring a colorful interior of the furniture.
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In a perfumery the most important thing is invisible – Aristotle and later the architects of renaissance imagined the space not as a void, but as an invisible matter – the fifth element (connecting the other four).
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There is no intellectual discipline here, rather a sensual pleasure of exploring (and designing) successive details.
Galilu Olfactory Perfumery
location: Koszykowa Street, Warsaw, Poland
design: Marcin Kwietowicz
client: Warynia Grela, Agnieszka Łukasik
total floor area: 57m2
usable floor area: 45 m2
volume: 223 m3
design: 2008
construction: 2009
