Specialist marble and terrazzo supplier London’s Diespeker & Co recently created and installed bespoke flooring for the high profile refurbishment of the Paul Smith flagship store, Westbourne House in Notting Hill.
Paul Smith designs, encompassing clothing, accessories and home trimmings, are idiosyncratic yet elegant and timeless, encapsulating the iconic designer’s innate creativity. The brand’s stores reflect the ethos, with each location having a distinctive character.
Westbourne House, located on the corner of Westbourne Grove and Kensington Park, is set within a beautiful traditional Victorian townhouse, which from the outside continues to look like a normal house. Inside, however, is a treasure trove of eye-catching merchandise.
Refurbishment of the flagship store called on Diespeker’s expertise for three elements; the basement floor, entrance step and windowsills. For the 50m² of flooring, blocks of four different types of marble were incorporated into terrazzo to conceive a unique design.
The marble was an interesting and eclectic mixture of colours and textures, from the dark red of Rosso Lavante, the veined white Calacatta Oro and streaked Dove Grey to the soft beige of Light Emprodor. The chunks were either roughly broken or precision cut, creating a highly unusual mixture of engineered and natural materials.
The entrance step required bespoke terrazzo to be laid in situ. Set within the step, the signature Paul Smith logo in brass was made using precision waterjet cutting to give clean, crisp cut edges.
The windowsills were cut to specification at Diespeker’s London factory from standard slabs of terrazzo, using the latest in Italian cutting machinery.
The store re-opened its doors in late August 2014 offering fashionable clientele an even more memorable retail experience.
