Terrane Showroom
- Copenhagen, Denmark
- Ida Krøyer
- Commercial
- 2024
A stone showroom has an unusual problem: the material on display is more beautiful than anything that could be built to display it. The design's ambition was therefore almost entirely negative — to build as little as possible, and to make what had to be built recede.
The printing hall's volume was left completely open. Its concrete frame, patched where the presses had been bolted down, is the only structure in the room. Into it we set a grid of freestanding racks in waxed mild steel, thin enough in section to read as lines rather than as objects, holding full slabs upright at a slight lean so that customers see stone the way it is quarried rather than the way it is sampled.
Light was the difficult part. Stone is judged on colour and on the depth of its figure, and both change completely under artificial light. The existing north roof-lights were reopened and glazed in a low-iron glass, and the artificial lighting is set to a colour temperature matched to Copenhagen's overcast midday — so a slab chosen at four in the afternoon in November will look the same when it arrives on site.
Everything else is a single dark grey. Floor, racks, the small consultation room at the back, the counter — all in the same tone, chosen to sit below every stone in the inventory. Samples are stored in deep drawers rather than displayed on walls; the walls are empty.
The one indulgence is a long bench of a single travertine block near the entrance, left unpolished. It is the only piece of the merchant's own product in the building that is not for sale.