Officine Universelle Buly‘s meticulously crafted brand identity and ditto offerings resonate well with Japanese consumers, and it’s no surprise the Land of the Rising Sun is one of the company’s most important markets. Although already present in Tokyo‘s sprawling metropolitan area with eight boutiques, Officine Universelle Buly has just added a new retail space on the premises of Shibuya PARCO, a fiercely on-trend department store and an all-time fav shopping destination of the brand’s highly discerning co-founder Ramdane Touhami. Mind you, this boutique on the second floor is in addition of an existing one on the ground floor and comes with an entirely different aesthetic, one that’s audaciously inspired by Japan‘s impressive seismic record—each year a staggering number of approx. 5,000 minor earthquakes are registered throughout the archipelago.
Spawning from this notion, Touhami and affiliated design firm Art Recherche Industrie have created an evocative setting marked by slanted lines that not only aims to evoke chaos and disorder, but also honours Japanese architecture’s ongoing reinvention. Flooring of grey marble, with natural inclusions of rocks and fossils that has been intentionally left raw, anchors the shop unit. A robust sales counter, encapsulated in blue-tinted glass, and flanked on three sides by large cabinets crafted from glass and framed in scented hinoki wood. The construction lines of the windows are all cut in irregular diagonals In these windows, the rhythm of the wedges follows a calculated wave like that of dominoes falling to recreate the movement of the fall. And yes, even neon shop sign is itself tilted. The new Officine Universelle Buly store carries a curated range of items from the brand’s elaborate offerings.
Officine Universelle Buly
Shibuya PARCO, 15-1 Udagawa-cho, Second Floor (Shibuya)
Tokyo 150-0042
Telephone: +81 3 64161888
Daily 11am-8pm
Publishers Note
Just to be clear – superfuture® is a design blog and not a political commentator. No surprise there. The scope of our content has always been global and borderless, however that can often mean covering projects in countries where we will not agree with the politics or actions of those countries. In a world that’s as screwed up as ever right now, the focus of our support is to those designers, architects and other creatives who aim to make the world a more liveable one – as opposed to people that try their hardest to destroy it. So if a project hits our desk and we like it based on its design credentials, we may choose to publish regardless of its location or creators nationality. superfuture® has always been inclusive and hopes for all current wars, aggression, violence, hate and extremism to end.
