Rajeunir Black Caviar is a prototype retail store for a start-up luxury dermatological products company that has had a successful online business and wants to expand to brick-and-mortar locations. The owners are seeking to develop brand identity through a unique environment in their store by creating individualized spaces carved out of the walls for each customer and smaller spaces are carved out for product placement. The smooth continuous surface that defines the retail space, when cut into, reveals that the surface has depth which also defines a space to frame customers and products.

The deep surface that defines the interior environment of the retail space is continuous, forming the walls and ceiling defined entirely with cabinetry and millwork. The ceiling and wall surface reveals its thickness in the shelving system where gaps between the horizontal shelves allow view into the depth of the system and provide the opportunity to cut deeply into the shelves to create individual spaces for people to sit and receive product demonstrations – demo stations. The repetition of the horizontal shelves stacked on top of each other provides a field condition into which the voided demo stations are registered. Thus, the shelving system reveals the thickness of the primary surface that defines the walls and ceiling through the cutting and removal of shelving with a curved form to expose the depth of the surface.

The design process of cutting into the field of horizontal layers generates a process of concealing and revealing that is further amplified through the interaction of two different systems within the shelving. The primary system is the field of horizontal shelves while the secondary system is comprised of a series of objects embedded into the field. The objects are redefined as a series of horizontal layers and interlaced between each shelf, creating the method to provide a gap between every horizontal shelf. Since the two systems are interlaced, they can act independently although the hierarchy of the field of shelving over the embedded, and thus concealed, objects remains.  The process of cutting into the primary system, or field condition of horizontal shelves, for the demo stations and product display areas provides the opportunity to expose the objects embedded within the depth of the primary surface. Thus, the when objects are embedded within the field of shelves they are concealed and when the programmatic spaces (voids of the demo stations or product display) cut into the primary system, the objects are revealed.

The cabinetry system provides the opportunity to explore a process of concealing and revealing the surface thickness using digital fabrication for the geometric control of the wood panels and shelves. The shelving system and embedded object are created from profile cuts into plywood and stacked, interlacing shelving and object layers. The smooth wall and ceiling panel system are comprised of a frame with face surface, which were all fabricated from plywood. In total the project required 200 sheets of plywood and MDF to be CNC machined to achieve the tight tolerance within the store.