Flexible Showcase – Mobilia Melbourne by GOLDEN
Home to a curation of international furniture brands, Mobilia’s new showroom on Cremorne’s Church Street combines a contemporary sleekness with references to the formerly industrial area. Rising to the challenge of ensuring that the space facilitates different environments to align with each of the products, GOLDEN has created a showroom that offers individualised settings befitting the design icons displayed within.
With a passion for bringing the best global design to Australia, Mobilia needed a space that could capture an eclectic spirit. It also needed to feel cohesive and reminiscent of the company’s ethos of expressing and highlighting a crafted approach. Showcasing brands such as Moroso, Cassina, Poltrona Frau and Kettal under the one roof, it was important for the space to facilitate the high-end and potentially competing brands and allow each to have their respective moments while sitting comfort-ably alongside one another. In response, GOLDEN plays on scale and materiality, offering enclosed moments of intimacy and others of more reflective openness, which naturally creates hierarchy within the interior.
Cremorne, in Melbourne’s inner east, has become a hub for major local and international furniture and lighting suppliers, with the Mobilia showroom set in the heart of the action. In designing the space, GOLDEN responded to both the history of the suburb, which is dotted with red brick factories and other ancillary manufacturing buildings, and its present identity as a design destination. In keeping with the area’s industrial legacy, texture plays a key role in defining the experience of the store. As a result, metal is used in numerous ways to define spaces and create a balance to the other more weighty finishes. There is a gallery-like aesthetic and feel, where moveable lighting allows for different pieces to be highlighted, and high ceilings create a spacious feel. Both built and soft partitioning helps to delineate zones within the showroom, as do colour and materiality.
Layering brands and identities throughout while also capturing the essence of the Mobilia ethos, the new showroom takes its place within Melbourne’s design focal point. Fulfilling a complex brief with aplomb, GOLDEN channels Mobilia’s passionate spirit.
