Two design firms created Westfield Sydney's shopper-stopping look. Neither had designed a shopping centre before. Erin O'Loughlin gets the scoop on how this ambitious retail development came together.
When it comes to retail design, Westfield knows what it's doing. The company has overseen the development, design and construction of the 54 shopping centres that make up its current Australian and New Zealand property portfolio, not to mention handfuls of developments in markets including the UK and the US.
Yet when it came to imagining the look of the company’s most recent development, Westfield Sydney, it handed responsibility over to two firms that had never worked on a shopping centre's design. Ever.
The first firm, Melbourne-based John Wardle Architects, was responsible for creating Westfield Sydney's exterior. The second was even more exotic: Wonderwall, a Tokyo-based interior design company, was commissioned to create Westfield Sydney's interior. Wonderwall's founder and principal, Masamichi Katayama, cannot speak a word of English.
The rationale
Why on earth would Westfield entrust the appearance of its $1.2 billion development to people who had never done this kind of work before? Westfield’s principal concepts designer, Frank Alvarez, explains.
“Key for us was really putting Sydney back on the map internationally,” he says. Westfield Sydney was not ever going to imitate the company's showcase regional shopping centres, with car parks and cinemas and discount department stores, he says. It was intended this project would take Australian retailing to a whole new atmosphere.
John Wardle, the founder of John Wardle Architects and the man who has overseen the design of Westfield Sydney's exterior for the past four years, has another 18 months to go before the project is entirely complete.
“A lot of our work is much more in the civic realm of things but they brought us in because it would seem we have a relevant contribution to make to the values of this project that's set in the middle of the city,” Wardle says. “And Wonderwall and their work – often in shops themselves – to bring them in to look at these public spaces has been a really interesting bit of thinking on Westfield's part.”
The site
The skeleton of Westfield Sydney was formed decades ago in the form of three neighbouring shopping arcades: Centrepoint, Imperial Arcade, and Skygarden. Westfield bought the lot in order to transform them into a new complex. While the company instigated some major construction work, the buildings were never flattened completely. Wardle and Katayama had to work within their existing frameworks.
“We had to deal with so many existing circumstances; it was a much more challenging prospect than if it had just been a cleared site and starting from scratch, which it never was,” Wardle says.
“It's certainly much more compelling and made the job much more interesting. It really was stitching together a whole series of different, new and existing buildings into one cohesive whole without it overwhelming the texture of the city and the nature of all of these smaller parts that are so important to exist as a retail destination.”
Through his translator, Katayama explains he too found the construction extremely complicated.
“(T)he situation is very unique,” he says. “Within this shopping mall, the ceiling height is different depending on the area or floor. Since the structure was complicated, it was difficult to find a solution. But a tough situation is much fun to help find a solution.”
Creating the exterior
The challenge of the job, says Wardle, was creating a “very strongly pronounced precinct” without it becoming a “thunderous, big, uniform box shopping centre. It's a very fine balancing act,” he admits.
In terms of Westfield's design brief, Wardle says an emphasis on doubled-heighted shop fronts was key.
“[They requested] a whole new idea for the way awnings would be perceived, because awnings really define the edge of a thing like this, particularly in Sydney which has very strong guidelines for the way awnings set the character of the façade of these shops. So to elevate them and, rather than being neutral, to have a strong, emblematic architectural response. To be double-heighted, so they could bring oxygen into the edge of the building, actually lift them up and then provide a great pronouncement of the shop fronts.”
The materials Wardle and his team used in the exterior include concrete, sandstone, glass and zinc. It's the use of sandstone that gets Wardle talking.
“The whole adventure starts at the Skygarden building on Pitt Street Mall and there's a great sandstone five-storey high elevation there that sits against the historic façade. Then as it weaves itself all the way around, it terminates with the sandstone cladding at 77 Castlereagh Street, which we cut into a sort of corduroy pattern.”
What Wardle also worked hard to create was a “very permeable” development.
“There's a whole lot of entries into this shopping centre, the entries at ground level and the four different bridges that come in at three different levels around the perimeter of the site. And then the lane way that cuts a swathe right into the middle of the precinct.
Rather than just having one single-frontage to Castlereagh Street, it turns inward, to actually bring the outside right into the heart of the building.”
Finally, the transparent nature of the edges of the building – such as the glass bridges – mean each shopper has a long line of uninterrupted sight into the Westfield Sydney complex. “It encourages a greater understanding of this very complex interior world,” Wardle says.
Different floors, different worlds
Inside was the domain of Katayma and his team of interior designers. Famed for the ideas he has unleashed in stores including Colette in Paris and flagships for the likes of Nike, Fred Perry and Marc Jacobs, Katayama says that among his key concerns was actually getting harried and hurried city folk to step inside.
“When you're in the suburbs, you have more relaxed feelings, but when you're in the centre, everything is so fast, busy,” Katayama says. “To draw people into the centre of the city you need a provocative approach.”
The key request from Westfield was that each floor of the centre have a different feel, emphasising in turn the varied retail offer.
For level one, devoted to urban retailers, Katayama went for dark lighting and
dark materials.
“Since it's streetwear, I tried to make it as if it's really on the street,” he explains. Rather than standard shopping centre tiles, the floor is polished grey concrete. The walls are composed of used brick and the ceiling of rubber and steel.
Up on level two, fast fashion retailers like Colette Accessories, Bardot, Cue and Gap have taken up residence.
Westfield's Alvarez explains the centre wanted to encourage fast-paced shopping on the level.
“There were no finishes around the shop portals from our perspective because we've encouraged them to have big, fast, shop openings so they can take advantage of the customer flow that's running through,” he says.
Katayama wanted to bring some calm and warmness to the zone, and as such selected basket-weave patterned wood for the ceiling.
On levels three and four, the emphasis is more on luxury than fast shopping. Marble tiles line the floors, and matte finish stainless steel pillars rise to meet mirrored stainless steel ceilings.
“We used limited colours and materials to give a luxurious feeling but with a modesty,” Katayama says.
The wow effect
Among the “provocative” features Katayama has worked into the design are what he calls voids, or open air spaces that pass through multiple floors, allowing shoppers to peer into other levels.
“(I)f you can see how many floors this shopping centre is, you will think 'maybe I can go to upper floor later'. If you can see a long corridor, then you will know how many shops are there. Immediately you have information.”
There are two shopper-stopping voids in particular, the first bathed in white reflected light and wrapped around the escalators near one of Westfield Sydney's street level entrances. The second is black, and focuses on the base of Sydney Tower, formerly called Centrepoint, which sprouts through the shopping centre's floors before rising to its well-recognised peak.
“With the previous shopping mall, the Sydney Tower was covered and we were not able to see, but we thought it was a good asset to the building and to Sydney. We thought it would be a good idea to show that presence.”
While Katayama confesses he was granted much creative freedom by Westfield and has incorporated some dazzling interior features, his true intention was really to chase a sense of timelessness.
“Usually a lot of developers ask us to provide a 'wow effect'. Wow effect is an important feature but the total image is more important than just one wow effect because it should stay long, it's not a temporary store.”
Nevertheless, the brand-spanking-new centre elicits from a nearby teenage shopper what must be a rewarding sentiment to each and every one of Westfield Sydney's designers: “It's sure not Charlestown...”