Nature Store is an LVMH competition with a brief to create a universal environmental intervention for LVMH stores around the world.
Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, commonly known as LVMH, is a French multinational holding and conglomerate specializing in luxury goods, headquartered in Paris. LVMH controls around 60 subsidiaries that manage 75 prestigious brands. In addition to Louis Vuitton and Moët Hennessy, LVMH’s portfolio includes Tiffany & Co., Christian Dior, Fendi, Givenchy, Marc Jacobs, Stella McCartney, Loewe, Loro Piana, Kenzo, Celine, Sephora, Princess Yachts, TAG Heuer, and Bulgari.
LVMH Competition
During the masters program at Central St. Martins, our course took part in an LVMH competition. We were split into groups of 3 with a brief to create an environmental intervention to be applied to any LVMH store.
The Loewe Living Mesh
Our proposal was crafted from a constellation of ideas which have evolved and been combined to create something larger than the sum of their parts: a system for care – of people, of the environment, and of the brand. These individual ideas were applied and refined in a number of configurations, developing into three main scales of intervention (from micro to macro) which can each be applied as needed to LVMH Maisons based on their context and requirements.
The three scales of intervention, are as follows: subliminal, psychological interventions, a seasonal and circular living mesh system and finally, an evaporative cooling measure, we entitled this as the symbiotic wind-catcher which creates ecosystems on the facades.
The intervention show on the left grew from an observation made in the Louis Vuitton store, where there was a decorative suspended ‘living mesh’ with a repeating brand motif hanging behind the glazing. We began by wondering if this decorative element could serve a practical function. This came to mind again when looking at the idea of evaporative cooling strategies where warm air can be cooled by passing it through a mesh that’s kept constantly damp. Here’s a model made using flax, Vinca, bamboo, Ivy and Eucalyptus (would be deeper in reality as presented further down).
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These ideas were all inspired by site tours of the Loewe and Louis Vuitton stores.
The first idea is to ‘nudge’ through design. These are the small, subliminal aspects of the store which have a large impact on our psychology. It is possible to invoke widespread positive change by harnessing the prestige and desirability of the brands to subtly convey environmentally conscious principles to clients, encouraging them to adopt said principles in their own everyday lives.
Here, the mesh is made up of the brands logo repeated over and over. It acts as a substrate on which mosses and other plants can grow and trap moisture. Water will trickle down through its patterned structure, cooling the air that passes through it while creating a new ecosystem in the process.
This second strategy for cooling warm air, illustrated here, is inspired by a tried and tested vernacular approach that originates from Oman, where a protruding structure is used to hold a porous ceramic vase. Here warm air gets drawn through to the mesh enclosure, passing the wet surface of the vase on its way in – cooling the air. Both the Muscatese system and our living mesh harness the power of evaporative cooling, relying on natural materials and processes rather than mechanical air conditioning.
We decided to combine these strategies to create a larger scale adaption of the muscatese system that incorporates our living mesh as another cooling element. This will be achieved with our proposal of combining the two systems of the living mesh and the muscatese system to create a what we call a ‘symbiotic wind-catcher’, which also goes further by creating the exciting opportunity for an entirely new habitat for wildlife on the facade.
Scaling this intervention up x 500…
This symbiotic structure would project into the street from the upper levels of any LVMH Maison, and would become a functional, biophilic and iconic cultural addition to the brand’s public presence. The wind catcher would funnel a large quantity of air through an opening in the facade, increasing the airflow within the store and, at the same time, providing a significant passive cooling effect. This would be achieved by filling the central section of the structure with a ‘living mesh’ of damp-loving plants over which the air would pass and lose heat through evaporative cooling. The internal opening of this structure would be filled with beautiful rustic vases crafted from a specially designed porous ceramic material.
This design consists of a small number of simple component types that could be CNCed or fabricated from timber – it is essentially a flat-pack system that can be rapidly produced, transported, assembled and disassembled. This means the intervention could be temporary but is also easily repairable.
These hanging gardens can also play host to their own varied ecosystems, housed in the outer edges of the dramatic floral structure. -This newly created habitat, which reaches out and opens its arms to the street, could offer the space for bird boxes, beehives and plant life to thrive. Each location would have a specially tailored selection of such flora and fauna, crafted to meet the needs of its specific climate.
The competition resulted in no winners, the LVMH panel decided they loved all the groups ideas so much that they wanted to pay the MArch course to collect all the ideas for their archive to refer back to
when desired.
This was a group project and all work shown was an effort put together by myself, Rowan St John and Elliot Wedge.