A Truly Urban Setting Where the Customer Can Feel at Home. Our Interior Design for the New Mall in Stuttgart’s Gerber Quarter.

Access to the public areas of the GERBER is provided via entrances set at three of the four corners of the building. Thanks to its strategic position at several crossroads, shoppers are guided straight into the mall from the surrounding streets. The two entrances on Tübinger Straße lie at ground level whereas the Marienstraße entrance is one level higher. This height difference coupled with the non-linear layout of the main shopping trajectories within the mall make a clear and precise guidance system indispensable.

The entrance areas already introduce key themes of the interior design. A central element of the interior identity are light rings whose shape echo the GERBER logo – a letter ‘g’ constructed from two circles. The positioning of these rings responds to the respective entrance situation. At the narrow, steeper entrance at the eastern corner, an interlocking, linear chain of rings accompanies the visitor upwards. While at the wider northern entrance, they explode across the ceiling in a wide arc. At the third, single-storey entrance, curved bands of light integrated into the ceiling adapt the theme while tracing the route that forks here. The theme of intertwining rings thus creates a signature address for each entrance. The light rings reach their pinnacle at the very heart of the mall where they entwine a column and extend upwards to form a tree of light piercing all three storeys.

Incised airspaces create visual links between the different levels of the mall. Rounded ceilings and balustrades give the space a flowing appearance and emphasise its verticality. Glass sides make the ceiling layers appear less weighty, revealing shop façades on other levels and attracting shoppers to continue their shopping spree there. The monochrome colouring of all public areas adds a note of elegance. The lack of colour also deliberately avoids visual competition with individual shop façades.

The flowing movement is continued in the curved edges of the shop façades. A handbook for store façade design was developed to ensure a cohesive look throughout the mall’s interior. The spatial feel and high-quality materials used for the façades underscore the its positioning in a more high-class retail segment. The shop façades are additionally brought into line by a continuous, warm dark grey façade screen. Its horizontal line traces the exterior borders of the public areas and serves as a means of orientation. Black light channels set into the ceiling and dark wooden hand rails support this effect by circumscribing the spatial apertures. The play of black lines is completed in a dark strip running down the back of the back-lit escalators. Each escalator serves as a striking light object and an important horizontal orientation point.