Image Credit : Pier Carthew
Project Overview
One Fine Secret is a specially curated journey, designed to be a unique retail experience as well as an escape to soothe and calm the senses.
Sitting on the quieter end of Chapel Street in South Yarra, One Fine Secret is a hidden gem waiting to be discovered. With a focus on wellness and care, One Fine Secret is the destination for clean beauty lovers who seek and appreciate the finer details.
The space welcomes visitors with its gentle curves and softly textured walls, creating a sense of calm and refuge from the busyness of everyday life. The view lines into the store are partially concealed by curved walls, sculpted to peel away as you enter the space. The beauty bar, with its gua-sha-inspired form, is the protagonist, with its uniquely deep, green marble top, carefully curved to invite people to gather for conversation. The color palette is a mixture of subtle and bold tones, with shelves that line the walls, acting as a backdrop to products that celebrate beauty derived from nature - a reflection of One Fine Secret’s ethos.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Architect: Barbara Chung
Branding and Graphic Design: Ortolan
Carpenter: Young Jin (Jimmy)
Project Brief
The client asked for a space that was bright, and welcoming and reflected the brand's values on inner beauty through kindness.
As a result, the project brief called for a revamp of an existing empty site, that required a fresh and new interior to showcase One Fine Secret's niche selection of clean beauty products. The One Fine Secret community celebrates clean beauty and all the independent founders of each unique product. The design of the store was executed in a way that created a humble and intimate space that invites passersby to approach, explore, and discover the world of clean beauty.
Project Innovation/Need
Spaces for beauty retail can often feel very busy and overwhelming, especially when the store stocks a large variety of different brands. As a result, these stores tend to lose their identity and feel like a clustered 'marketplace', which is not calming to the senses. What our client needed was a design that presented many different brands under one roof without it feeling 'busy' like your typical Mecca or Sephora store.
To maintain One Fine Secret's identity whilst showcasing its huge variety of products, only colors and textures that reflected the company's graphic design branding (by Ortolan) were used in the space.
Spatially, the products are showcased around the perimeter of the space where the central, gua-sha-inspired stone island bench area is reserved for conversations and learnings about the clean product ranges. Much like the ancient use of the gua-sha which is used to move energy around the body, this central island bench acts as a base for reflection and conversation about the products that surround it.
Overall the design aims to create a community within the space between One Fine Secret and the many independent brands that it represents and supports.
Design Challenge
The main design challenge was low access to natural light within the existing site. This was used to our advantage by creating a welcoming space with curves and circular feature shelving at the front of the store, to help create intrigue and invite passers by. After one enters the store, the space then peels away via. a curved wall to reveal the rest of the store's retail offerings. The inner space, which has low levels of natural light, is illuminated with concealed linear lights that are recessed into the shelves to create a golden glow that is calming to the senses as one browses through the store's collection.
Sustainability
Robust and high-quality materials such as hardwood timbers and natural stone were used in the space for their longevity and future re-use.
Offcuts from timbers and stone were reused and cut into a variety of shapes and forms that were doodled by OFS's team and used for retail display to avoid wastage. Some loose display objects were also hand-made by the client's team which reduced the need to purchase new materials and also helped build teamwork.
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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