Joya Studio
Creating the Architecture of Fragrance
Fragrance design studio, Joya, and Taylor and Miller Architecture/Light joined forces...
...to create a radically conceived retail experience meant to hover between the context of consumption and production. These two environments in today’s society have been too often ripped apart for the sake of protecting the sanctity of the antiseptic and heavily branded retail store.
Located in Brooklyn, NY, Joya Studio offering innovative perfumes, personal care and home ambiance under its own label, as well as engaging emerging and established artists and brands for unique, collaborative projects. In addition to creating a concept shop to display this collection, there was also a desire to create a space for workshops, classes with visiting perfumers and art installations.
Taylor and Miller’s lead designers B. Alex Miller and Jeff Taylor, along with Aoife O’Leary, sought to create a retail environment for Joya that is literally and figuratively suspended between the formality, cleanliness, and elegance of a retail space and the informality and grit of a highly active factory. The space is comprised of a series of large floating steel and wood veneer surfaces suspended by steel rods from the factory ceiling. None of the steel surfaces touch each other.
While steel surfaces define the retail space, the factory space in which they are suspended permeates the retail experience. The retail sides of the floating steel surfaces and their associated display niches are wrapped in an oak wood veneer. Meanwhile, the factory side of the surfaces is left entirely bare; as are all of the structural angles, associated tack welds and electrical conduit. The visitor experience of the consumption and production spaces is separated intentionally by the thinnest of architectural elements; a single sheet of veneer and a single sheet of steel.
Acclaim Highlights
As a multi-disciplinary firm, Taylor and Miller also work in the realm of lighting design, making lighting a key component of this project. Taylor and Miller carefully accented the display niches with Flex Pro Interior, (2700k) a high output, low voltage, thin and flexible LED circuit strip from Acclaim Lighting, based in Los Angeles. Flex Pro Interior was developed for custom interior architectural lighting schemes based on its ability to be cut to an exact length within two inches for custom applications. For Joya Studio, Flex Pro creates a soft subtle glow on the products in the display niches and highlight the warm tones of the wood. (Current Product: Flex One HO Interior)
The flexible LED strip provides ample lighting by producing 600 lumens per foot and only consumes 5.5 watts per linear foot. Specifying the Flex Pro Interior also gave Taylor and Miller the flexibility of setting the atmosphere by selecting from various color temperatures such as 2400K, 2700K, 3000K, 3500K and 4000K. It also features a wide 120 degree beam angle and maintains 70 percent of its lumens at 50,000 hours. (Current Product: Flex One HO Interior)
With the successful integration of the two environments, this unique space hosts tours, events, workshops and interactive art installations. Joya Studio is also a Brooklyn Building Award winner, an honoree in the 2016 Interior Design Best of the Year and NYCxDesign Awards and received an honorable mention from the American Architecture Prize.