Shopping experiences: Part 2

One store that I find fascinating in how the owners have chosen to display their wares is Adagio Interiors.

Faced with the eternal dilemma of how best to display prim-rich furniture within strict limits, the designers – Celty Westwick and Jamie Cheeky – have hit on a novel solution with their vendors. Rather than rezzing pictures of rooms designed to display their furniture, the main vendors rezz entire rooms – and then snatch them away, to replace them with the next treat. A black diamond living room, therefore, might rezz into an elegant pale Parisian version -or a cream pale Parisian bathroom, offering a spacious bathtub and a wide shower (this is definitely furniture made for sharing) might suddenly become a rather dramatic black diamond version of the same room!

Then, if you wish, you can buy the entire set from the vendor or – if you have just fallen in love with individual pieces, more conventional vendors on the wall offer the chance to pick up exactly what you need.

Admittedly, this approach can be a little disconcerting. If you’re the sort of person who likes to test your potential furniture by sitting in it for several minutes, you may be in for a surprise. But it does give you the chance to experience a variety of set ups in a contain area.

And there are variations in how the vendors work. Some – like the Elegance range – show the same room in different styles. Others – like the cottage furniture – scroll through the different rooms all in the same style.

One of the joys of Adagio Interiors is the richness of the textures they use – and this is apparent even in the cottage styles, which draw on the works of Pre-Raphaelites like Edward Burne-Jones. Indeed, this richness is reflected throughout the store, including in the lovely exterior of the building. I particularly liked the way that the statues are incorporated into the pillars of the building, to create a semi-caryatid effect.

But it’s not only with big extravagant sweeps and flourishes of textures that Adagio Interiors scores. Even the smallest details are extremely well thought out, sometimes in a way that seems to be a private joke shared between designer and owner.

You can see this if you look at this chair from the Elegance range. It is not simply a matter of adding a a rich texture in the edging and braiding on the armchair – or even of incorporating an antimassacar. No, this incorporates a head one the end of each arm, with a dramatic head. A panther perhaps? And yet it has an oddly human look …

All in all, it’s an unexpected thing to find at the end of a chair arm! But this unexpectedness, this sense of playfulness is very much a feature of the furniture that Celty and Jamie are producing.

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Furniture from Adagio Interiors