Sarah & Sebastian Armadale
Two things were top of mind for Sarah Gittoes and Robert Sebastian Grynkofki, founders of Australian fine jewellery company Sarah & Sebastian, when they approached Richards Stanisich to create their latest retail boutique.
First, the pair wanted to bring a residential tone to the store, which is located in a heritage building in Armadale in south-east Melbourne, so that customers would feel as if they were walking into a friend’s place rather than a commercial enterprise. Translating that meant creating a series of zones within and a connection between each room to echo the way one traverses a home.
“The entry point is a generous area with very little merchandise,” says architect Kirsten Stanisich. “This allows some time to adjust to the transition from the street, just as you might feel in the entry of a well-designed house.” The interior spaces are broken up with large, stylised corbel arches, which create smaller zones while introducing human scale to the voluminous ceilings. “They also bring a real sense of procession through the store.”
More crucial in the brief was Gittoes’ desire for the space to reflect her abiding passion for the ocean and, in particular, diving. “We wanted it to capture the feeling Sarah has when she’s diving,” says Stanisich. “And while we didn’t want to be too literal in our references, a lot of the inspiration came from the colours of kelp – those beautiful, iridescent kind of deep greens.
“We also detailed a vaulted silver-leaf ceiling to replicate that sense of being under water and looking up and through the reflective skin of the water and seeing that magical border between the ocean and the sky.”
The result is a space that conjures both the comfort of home and the luminosity of the ocean. Banquettes covered in ruched linen, a marblefringed fireplace and plush seating in the private viewing room engender a sense of the domestic while reflective surfaces, a high-gloss epoxy floor and palette of greens bring Gittoes’ underwater vision to shimmering life. Those greens, incidentally, garnered Richards Stanisich top honours in this year’s Dulux Colour Awards, with the judges describing the store as a “masterclass in colour psychology”.
Designing a jewellery outlet comes with unique challenges, notes Stanisich. Security is paramount, as is lighting: “Because the pieces are so fine, you obviously need enough light for customers to be able to see them, but we didn’t want to flood the store with excessive light.”
Equal consideration was given to the client journey. “Jewellery is so small and there’s a lot of it to be displayed, so the question for us was, ‘how do you design a space where people don’t feel overwhelmed by the volume of it all?’” By slightly angling the display fixtures, the Richards Stanisich team was able to “create a series of small pauses, a moment of respite before you focus on the next display – like a little run of palate cleansers”.
This kind of deeply considered design peppers every corner of the jewellery-box-like boutique. Grounded in colour, light and refraction, Sarah & Sebastian Armadale offers a retail experience that is fully immersive, in all the right ways.
Architecture and interior design by Richards Stanisich. Build and joinery by EMAC Constructions. Laminate surfaces by Laminex. Paint by Dulux.
