More than just being fun eye candy, great glasses frames also manage to convey a deeper sense of one’s personality — and the same is true of thoughtful retail designs. For the new Berlin outpost of Spanish eyewear brand Miller & Marc, local studio Coordination pulled from both local vernacular and from its client’s Spanish heritage to deliver an expressive character study.
Opened on a corner of Auguststrasse, a street in Berlin’s Mitte district that is known for its art galleries, Miller & Marc’s storefront features floor-to-ceiling windows that offer a clear view of the colourful scene inside. Throughout the 88-square-metre space, a fun two-tone palette combines rich terracotta and bright blue hues — both nods to Miller & Marc’s Spanish origins.
White shelving units are another international import, repurposed from a former Miller & Marc location back in Spain. As a B-Corp certified brand, the eyewear company has long embraced recycled materials in its designs, and Coordination was intent on bringing this same environmental ethos to the shop’s interiors.
While the colour scheme and shelving speak to the brand’s roots, other aspects of the design draw from Berlin’s design identity. Custom furnishings — most prominently, an oval-shaped display counter at the heart of the shop — are both locally fabricated and locally influenced, pulling from the brutalist architecture constructed in Berlin during the 1970s and 80s.
Along with structuring a wide-open space that is easy to browse, the store’s arrangement of rounded and straight-lined forms also evokes the pairing of circular lenses and long temples that characterize rimmed eyewear.
For all its conceptual appeal, the store still ensures that each pair of frames on offer is able to convey its own distinct charms. Indeed, by positioning Miller & Marc’s eyewear on white shelves against cream-coloured curtains, Coordination achieves a design that complements rather than overpowers the products on offer. Talk about having a clear perspective on retail.
