Selfridges Public Realm

Duke Street public realm project aims at creating an attractive urban environment for the new entrance of Selfridges department store designed by David Chipperfield Architects. It includes the redevelopment of the overall streetscape experience, including street lighting, paving, furniture, pedestrian comfort and traffic.

Together with the wider and renewed pavements, we developed the idea of a plaza, a focus point in front of the new entrance, including four precious feature trees as well as two sculptural elements, a marble bench and a fountain. Located in front of the new store entrance, these sculptural elements made of Italian marble provide a place to rest, meet and rehydrate. In a city where most public drinking fountains have disappeared, the fountain offers visitors, inhabitants and employees of the district a pleasurable opportunity to refill their water bottles and reduce plastic bottles proliferation. The sculptural marble bench is dedicated to different people; it offers four different sizes and shapes of seats. The possibility of planting being extremely limited in such a dense urban environment, the bench and fountain became elements which could potentially crystallise the idea of a wider landscape through their shape and materiality. Choosing this expressive green and white marble with strong geological movements was a way to evoke water, rocks, topography, mountains. The marble we used (Verde Luana) is extremely dense and was formed around 25 million years ago in the Apuan Alps (Toscana) where we went to choose the perfect marble block that we would then carve to create the bench and fountain.

High performance tree pit details including custom made tree grilles have been developed to optimise tree growth in an exceptionally cluttered underground environment. Tree species have been selected considering the different constraints of the site.

While generally keeping in line with Westminster ‘s palette of materials and general ethos, the project aims at creating an original and unique moment in Mayfair‘s public realm and increase the quality of one of London‘s busiest urban environment.