September 21, 2006 | Recommend this Article »

Gem in London

New jewellery department of Harrods with onyx panels

According to the plans of Czech architect Eva Jiricna, the interior design for the jewellery department of Harrods also utilizes the liveliness of the stone as well as glass elements. The customer walks through a tunnel clad in black marble before entering the actual sales room. The room is enclosed with back-lit wall cladding of honey-yellow onyx alternating with mirrors and glass showcases, with plain sales counters covered with beige leather winding their way through the room. The onyx panels act as room dividers and provide light. Only a strip of ceiling lights with lights at individual points provides additional illumination of the room.

The customer glides through the room over a soft, beige carpet, past the glass-top shop tables. If required, he can approach one of the sales specialists, who then advises him in separate areas for this purpose. To ensure the necessary discretion, free-standing transparent cells of curved glass elements have been set up in the room.
The ambience is given a really luxurious touch by the illuminating onyx boxes, whose changing colours immerse the room first in pale yellow, then in intensive orange. Brown veins run through the stone in various directions and give the wall liveliness and its own characteristic. The almost room-high elements project in box form from the wall behind them. Each of the slabs with a maximum size of some 100 x 90 centimetres is fixed at the corner points. All the necessary construction joints are reduced to a minimum to allow the materials used to create their own effect, which certainly works! Turnover at Harrods has apparently risen by 20 per cent in the first month after the renovation.