Image Credit : All photography by Paul Barbera.
Project Overview
We teamed up with iconic Australian tea brand, T2, to launch the company’s first US store in Soho, New York. Whilst the dark and aromatic design brings a distinctly Melbourne feel to Prince Street, our work was evolutionary for a brand that trusts its instincts and often goes the opposite way to the pack. The uber cool mecca that is Soho was perfect for this evolution.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Landini Associates is a multi-disciplinary retail design and brand consultancy consisting of strategic planners, architects and interior, graphic and product designers. We produce world class, simple yet effective work that lasts. We are interested in the classic over the fashionable and many of our projects have a longevity that exceeds the market norm.
Strategically driven but creatively led, we are equally at ease inventing new brands as we are evolving and redefining existing ones. We bring about a fusion of multiple disciplines resulting in an end product with a singular vision. This results in the best possible outcome for both our clients and their customers.
Landini Associates is based in Sydney and is currently working in North America and Canada, the UAE, the UK, Asia and Australia. Clients include Loblaws, T2 (Unilever), Jones the Grocer (LVMH), Amore Pacific (Primera, Mamonde, Innisfree, Lirikos), Hilton Hotels, Burt's Bees, Westpac Bank Australia, Jurlique, Coles, Woolworths and various independents.
Project Brief
The brief was to reinvent T2 for a global market and launch it in NYC.
We believe that excellent interior retail design aims to perfectly reflect a brand’s personality. Just like T2 itself, our design is dedicated to celebrating the centuries-old art of making and drinking tea. We really focused on creating an intelligible space full of corners of intrigue, places to stop and smell and taste and chat and marvel at the world of senses that T2 have collected from around the globe.
Project Innovation/Need
We created a raw, stripped back, brutal interior to surprise and challenge the tradition of tea houses and provide a contrast to the elegant packaging and accessories. Taking advantage of a tall space, we created a double height tea library made from black oxidized steel that stylishly categorizes the tea by type and immerses customers in a knowledge bank of blends from around the globe. T2’s trademark orange packaging cascades from floor to ceiling, strikingly offset by the industrial colour palette.
Featured on the remaining walls is T2’s trademark Chinese newspaper - a testimony to the centuries-old art of tea-making, and a perfect backdrop to an oversized T2 logo lit by incandescent light bulbs. At the heart of the store, customers are enticed to explore their curiosity at the tea-tasting stations and aroma tables: a place to trial, learn or simply stop and drink. Brewing methods are demonstrated here amongst an extensive variety of tea wares sourced from around the world.
Design Challenge
The main challenge was addressing how best to arrange over 200 different types of tea in a visually pleasing and easy to navigate way. Probably the most significant thing we did was to add rigour, cataloguing the teas by type and arranging them with the size options that are available. We also added some graphic communications, arranging different types of teas together and explaining how to brew. We believe that this unfolding of the "mysteries and magic" of tea is an important part of the store’s evolution. Like so many brands they already do this well online but the retail channel was lagging behind. This alignment will be an important evolution moving forward.
A brewmaster demonstrating brewing methods at the Brew Bar engages customers and offers them the opportunity to learn directly about tea. This educational and exploratory element is key in helping T2 achieve the seemingly impossible: converting the acclaimed coffee drinkers of New York City to the exotic and enchanting world of tea.
Sustainability
Regarding sustainability, throughout the interior we have used classic, honest and raw materials that will last. We never design to trends, instead we design to create something special yet classic and as such it is not unusual for our designs to live up to and beyond 20 years. This is a studio philosophy that allows for sustainable design, and one that we applied when designing T2 Soho.
Interior Design - Retail
This award celebrates innovative and creative building interiors, with consideration given to space creation and planning, furnishings, finishes and aesthetic presentation. Consideration given to space allocation, traffic flow, building services, lighting, fixtures, flooring, colours, furnishings and surface finishes.
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