Lansky 126
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Interior Design
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Adaptive Reuse
Low Maintenance Materials -
Completed December 2006
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Memphis, Tennessee
The retail clothing store was transformed within a modest budget from a formerly cramped and confusing space into an open and more organized environment offering a fresher customer experience.
Located within the historic Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, Lanksy 126 was expanded into an adjacent space recently vacated. The new space had three floor elevations, all different from that of the clothing store. Mechanical equipment that was exposed within both spaces could not be moved and needed to remain accessible. The owner’s program required the doubling of their current inventory display space and the addition of two fitting rooms. In response, the wall separating the two spaces is transformed into an active transition between rooms, recast as a dynamic object concealing mechanical equipment, adding niches for product display and containing two fitting rooms. The dressing rooms appear as discovered spaces inside a part of the wall that has been pushed from one room into the other. The former division between the two rooms was altered in a way that it could become the organizing link between them. A large portion of the budget was used to raise or lower all the floors throughout the former warren of rooms to the level of the original store to provide accessibility. In the expanded space, layers of suspended ceilings were removed, and a new floating ceiling was introduced. The varying ceilings, walls, and fixtures in both new and existing spaces were painted white, and the new and existing wood floors and tables were stained the same tone - allowing the features to retain their different forms while bringing the spaces together.