As part their brand relaunch, Ultimo Interiors wanted to reinvent the look and feel of their Osborne Park furniture showroom. Alongside a new logo and a contemporary fit-out for the interior, the owners approached us to develop a high-impact new design for the nondescript white exterior; Ultimo are purveyors of high-end European design, and they wanted a facade to match. They also had a strict budget, given the scale of the relaunch and the size of the site itself.

With a showroom full of beautiful things to inspire us, our design inevitably drew on the details and structural properties of fine furniture. Lightweight clip-on space frame elements give striking detail to the main showroom, with an early Modernist look taken from the furniture of the Bauhaus Era. On the other side of the entrance, vertical aluminium tubing gives the loading dock a high-tech industrial feel, giving the impression of a screen or a drawn curtain. The asymmetrical nature and shifting patterns of the facade make it particularly eye-catching from the roadway.

We integrated backlit signage into the new canopy, with the new logo as the defining feature of the facade. The choice of Colorbond flat-rib sheet metal cladding gives the canopy an edgy, modern finish and also helped to keep costs down.