The Craftsman’s Shop: CuldeSac Designs Refined Workshop for Glent's Flagship

Snapshot: In Madrid, shoe company Glent creates a 3D model of customers’ feet and lets them customize their shoes. Spanish studio CuldeSac designs the Glent flagship store, and the look conveys a modern, refined masculinity without sacrificing a craftsman's ruggedness. Glent’s flagship takes 60 square meters and shows customers how the modern man struts his new shoes.

Glent is a Spanish brand that crafts custom shoes, and CuldeSac has conceptualized and developed the Glent flagship store in Madrid, and the design encapsulates the sleek, refined, personalized, suave tone of customized menswear.

The space is small, only 60 square meters, befitting a luxury brand who meets incoming clients not with shelves upon shelves of the latest footwear styles, but with warm smiles and and a 3D digitizer ready to take a model of the client’s foot--it’s a preliminary action, and client’s won’t ever need to sit down for it again, as the model is kept in a database.  The experience is like a more expensive personalization of a baseball cap, where you choose the material, the style, the organization, even the lettering, as clients can sign their initials or a message on virtually any surface of the shoe. 

The quaintness of the small space is matched by its masculine sense of style and efficiency, and allows for a finer touch in interior design.  The waiting area are accessed via marble steps and have suede carpets lying upon smoothly glossed wooden floorboards.  When shoes are displayed, the specimens represent variety and character, rather than the composite matrix of endless iterations with only slight nuances. They are all placed against a rectangularly-partitioned wooden backdrop matching the floorboards. 

The ruggedness of a craftsman’s shop is fleshed out to a fuller potential, specifically in the use of brown and gray tones upon all the stores surfaces, furniture included.  Setting this tone is crucial to a menswear brand, and it’s best realized in the central area where lies a designer workbench that recalls an industrial aesthetic, even having more comfortable and bowl-shaped version of factory stools.

The team members at CuldeSac are no strangers to the retail sector, including branding and interiors, and Glent joins their impressive repertoire of custom-designed retail houses with maxed-out efficiency and maxed-out profitability.  Production time has been kept to a mere four weeks, and customers can collect in-store or opt to have shoes mailed to their home.  For a man searching for classy new kicks, “shopping”--if you will--at Glent is seamless and inviting: the furniture asks you to sit down and have a brandy as much as it asks you to remove your shoes.