Perusastraße 2

Stone Island opens its new flagship in Munich, championing the brand’s core values in research, innovation and community. The three-floor, 360m2 store follows the new global retail concept designed in partnership with OMA/AMO, using materials and processes that reflect Stone Island’s legacy of development and experimentation, with design details that are unique to the Munich flagship.

Situated in Munich’s Old Town, the outside of the store is cut from local granite, paying homage to the city itself. Large windows look onto one of the innovations of the global store concept: a visual display module, called the Chandelier, that is suspended from the ceiling, able to be tilted and rotated, or even lowered to become an illuminated display table.

At the back of the ground floor, a red resin wall is home to a connected series of video displays, each detailing various stages of Stone Island processes. Alongside this, a display area highlights three iconic Stone Island pieces, including both important archival designs and new products, with video documentation for each that explores its stages of development.

In the basement, a community hub features tiered seating for lectures and events, as well as a display for special Stone Island pieces. Its walls are made from compressed layers of soil, resembling the veins that run through the earth. Throughout the store, materiality is crucial to the design concept, which has been led by Samir Bantal of OMA/AMO. Cork is the key element of the new global store concept, which has been burned, sand-blasted and coated. The resulting dark, structured cork has functional properties, both absorbing sound and working against humidity.

Shredded recycled paper and resins are compressed under high pressure to create furnishings that seem like concrete. Manually sandblasted corrugated metal panels are applied with sand and resins for textured effects. Lightboxes are clad with Tyvek®.

Confirming Stone Island’s commitment to innovation, three guest designers have created unique pieces for the store interiors. Tim Hooijmans of De Studio has manufactured light elements from durable and recyclable aluminium billets, which minimise energy consumption while maximising longevity. Tim Teven has designed stools for the changing rooms, and Elvis Wesley has created an aluminium case to house ever-evolving displays of special collection pieces.