Project type: Interior

Status: Built
Area: 120 m²
Year: 2022
Location: Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France
Team: Laura Malcaitė, Dmitrij Kudin, Renata Mickevičiūtė, Margarita Podagelytė
Photographs: Darius Petrulaitis

This perfume shop wants to become a memory, a postcard from the soft and warm holiday world, to be sensed and remembered long after you have left the shop or even the French Riviera town of Beaulieu-sur-Mer. It all comes back to you together with the terracotta beaches, local architecture, materials and textures, summer heat and a salty warm winter breeze, becoming tools for designing the interior of the shop.
Settled in the 1960s on the ruins of a pre-war house or, more precisely, on the site of the former gate portal, the shop has original vaults that have preserved here, revealing a unique junction of periods.
The shop presents a variety of spaces: an unexpectedly high entrance area overlooking the Alps, a chamber space below the mezzanine, and a more private space on the upper floor, where you can see the vaults up close, serving a romantic frame for the outside cypresses and tennis courts. The shell-shaped furniture resembling terracotta dishware in all spaces adds integrity to the whole place. Flirting with certain historical nostalgias, the dialogue is complemented by the furniture interpretation of the Palladian window, formed by modern means. Inspired by the architecture of French Mediterranean villas, the ground floor spaces are joined by a ‘colonnade’ of curved wooden veneer. This area is given to larger fragrance houses. The space below the mezzanine displays the products of smaller fragrance and cosmetics houses. The mezzanine floor is more intimate. Here the focus is on distinctive fragrance collections: each collection is given a separate shell structure within the perimeter formed by 'shells'.
The shop offers both natural daylight and eveninglight scenarios. So spatial experience and memory can vary depending on the moment you come here.