Directory

Retail Directory 2009 

Joseph, Westbourne Grove

London

Like so many success stories, Joseph started with a simple mission, answering a simple need. Joseph Ettedgui, a hairdresser from Casablanca, listened to the female clients in his salon bemoaning their lack of a perfect pair of trousers, put down his scissors, picked up a needle and thread and opened the doors of his self-named boutique in Chelsea in 1971. Back then he can but have dreamt of how hungry the well-heeled folk would be for his trousers and now Joseph is a mainstay of the UK retail scene with 14 stores in London alone. No brand can afford to rest on its laurels though, and never more so than now, hence Joseph’s having a spring clean of 8 of its bigger stores. Tom Dixon has been charged with the Old Bond Street store but it’s the makeover of the Westbourne Grove emporium by the Lebanese firm Raed Abillama Architects that caught our eye. Stripping away any cluttered display mechanisms, they’ve installed a series of white, uplit boxes that house a single rail on which the clothes hang like works of art. The boxes are interspersed throughout the store with mirrors of the same height, which makes for a uniform, grandiose simplicity - a perfect example of minimum clutter achieving maximum impact.

236 Westbourne Grove
London W11 2RH
44.20 7243 9920

www.joseph.co.uk