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Photograph: Mandarina Duck's inventive product displays include the ``Inverse Clothes Rack'' (this page and opposite), a steel-clad spaceshiplike booth that beckons shoppers inside it, and the ``Pallet Tunnel'' (this page and opposite top), a luminous shelving element made from industrial pallets cast in translucent plastic.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Copyright CHRISTOPH KICHERER
Mandarina Duck is not a Chinese restaurant, but an Italian company known for innovative luggage and design-conscious handbags. When it recently launched sportswear lines for men and women, its retail outlets needed rethinking. On top of creating a strong brand image with displays of accessories and clothing, Mandarina envisioned its new spaces as incubators for ideas.
For its flagship boutique, which opened in Paris last October, the playfully named company called on Amsterdam-based Droog Design (which literally, though perhaps tongue-in-cheek, translates as ``Dry Design''). While not architects or furniture/industrial designers themselves, Droog founders Renny Ramakers and Gijs Bakker regularly collaborate with designers and architects who share their irreverent, but always intelligent, design view. Ramakers and Bakker function much like art directors, alternately acting as talent scouts, curators, and visionaries. For the Paris store, Droog turned to another Dutch group, NL Architects.
The four NL partners--Pieter Bannenberg, Walter van Dijk, Kamiel Klaasse, and Mark Linnemann--had begun working together in the early 1990s...