A New Spin On Design Week

Annie Block -- Interior Design, 12/1/2005 12:00:00 AM

In a leafy shopping district in Tokyo stands a 1950's wattle-and-daub house converted into a Kate Spade flagship by Rogers Marvel Architects, the firm behind all 33 Kate Spade handbag stores worldwide. Although each interior features a standard palette and fixtures, exteriors express their location. "For Tokyo," principal Jonathan Marvel explains, "we spoke to the importance of landscape in Japanese architecture." That meant screening the facade in stainless-steel mesh that could be interwoven with green vines.

So it was quite a switch to see the mesh bedecked with rows of vinyl pinwheels—150 of them spinning playfully in the wind. A tribute to Tokyo's annual design and fashion weeks, which coincided this year in November, the installation actually owed its vibrant colors to a very different metropolis: Mexico City.

More specifically, Andy Spade, Kate's husband and the company's cofounder, was referencing the fall 2005 ad campaign, shot against the backdrop of a Luis Barragán–style house there. "The colors make everybody happy," Spade said—reached on location in Bisbee, Arizona, where he was shooting the spring 2006 campaign. Next November, perhaps the Tokyo shop will sprout cacti.