Selfridges Department Store Birmingham

Vittorio Radice, Selfridges’ chief executive was inspired by the practice’s project for BT/O2 at Ealing Studios, and commissioned Eldridge to design the entire floor of the radical Selfridges store in Birmingham. Thorough research and a desire to tell compelling stories created the dramatic setting for the building’s ‘Spirit’ floor - a rigorous and versatile landscape of shopping cultures and leisure product types appealing to a broad cross section of people in an accessible and non-elitist way. Two organising strategies structure the space: a main circulation route looping round the entire floor, and a parallelogram grid providing a matrix that gives positioning to individual shopping plots at floor level, lighting and other services. A series of enclosing walls of varying heights define and characterise the main shopping departments.

Laid out like fields in a landscape, the Fashion departments host the seasonally shifting fashion collections and their seasonal variation is unified by a smooth resin floor. The white finish to the exposed structure of the ceiling and services reflects and diffuses the strong daylight pouring into the atrium from the glass roof, reinforcing the naturalistic landscape quality of this part of the floor. Playing on the theme of the ‘ready made’, the fixture designs include flexible conveyor belts and large elliptical silver fabric photographic reflectors applied to the light fittings.