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Name: Muxart
Address: Rambla Catalunya 47, Barcelona (flagship)
Square footage: 820
Established: 1989
Owner/designer: Hermenegildo Muxart
Footwear brands: Muxart
Hermenegildo Muxart, born and based in Barcelona, has been designing footwear for more than 25 years. Now, thanks to his elegant stores and handmade shoes, Muxart is starting to stand out from the rest of the crowd.
Located in the upper Eixample neighborhood, where most of Barcelona's flagship designer stores are found, Muxart's shop on the leafy, tree-lined Rambla Catalunya (a classier version of the touristy Ramblas farther downtown) is as much an icon of design as its contents.Working together with an architect, Muxart has taken the same hands-on approach to creating his store interiors as he does with his collections. Space and light are key words in the Muxart design dictionary. The 820-sq.-ft. basement shop, which opened in 1989, is situated in a handsome building designed in a style common to Catalan Modernisme, a movement dating back to the turn of the 20th century. The dramatic, sage-gray, slate-tiled room, flanked by exposed columns, is bathed in light that envelops shoppers rather than simply spotlighting the shoes.
That's not to say the shoes don't take center stage. Windowlike display boxes hold...