Services: Design, Fabrication, CNC Machining, Installation Location: Selfridges, Oxford Street, London We were commissioned to design, fabricate and install a large-format architectural installation for Daniel Arsham’s residency in The Corner Shop at Selfridges London. The brief was to build a physical version of Arsham’s concept: a domestic space called The House, set in the year 3019, occupying one of the most prominent retail sites in the country. The installation needed to be structurally sound, visually exact, compliant with Selfridges’ fire rating requirements, and buildable within a complex wedge-shaped space with irregular geometry and undulating floors. It was one of the most technically demanding retail builds we have taken on.
Selfridges Corner Shop on Oxford Street is one of the most visible pop-up spaces in European retail. The artists and brands who occupy it are given complete creative freedom, and the expectation is that whatever goes in will be worth stopping for. Daniel Arsham’s residency formed part of his Future Relics collection, which imagines everyday objects eroded by the passage of centuries. The Corner Shop installation, called The House, presented domestic rooms as they might appear in the year 3019: a garage, kitchen, lounge, office and closet, each populated with artefacts from a reimagined future. Other elements of the collection included a crystal-eroded Porsche 911 and a vintage Mac. Building this world at full scale, to the standard Selfridges demands, was the brief we had to solve.
We designed and fabricated a series of three-metre tall wall sections that defined the rooms of The House within the Corner Shop space. Each section was acrylic-clad and CNC-etched with masonry detail: brick courses, window and door frames, house numbers and period decorative features. Internal uplighting ran behind each panel, illuminating the etched surfaces from within and giving the walls a quality that shifted depending on where you stood in the space. Additional built-in elements included electrical conduit, mains sockets, shelving and fully functioning doors. Arsham’s concept also called for a six-metre wide suspended roof section overhead, completing the sense of being inside a real building. The geometry of the space presented a significant engineering problem. The Corner Shop is an irregular wedge shape with undulating floors, and the wall sections needed to integrate precisely with Selfridges’ existing architecture without any perceptible compromise. We conducted detailed on-site surveys and digitally reproduced the space before any fabrication began, which allowed us to pre-plan every intersection and co-ordinate with other suppliers accurately before arriving on site. Custom fixings were designed in-house to anchor the installation correctly within the irregular geometry. All materials used were specified to meet Selfridges’ fire rating requirements, and all load-bearing fixings were independently rated for the purpose. The result was an installation that read as permanent, performed structurally throughout its run, and gave the public a convincing physical encounter with Arsham’s imagined world.
