Oscar Wylee’s New Store in Melbourne Central by DesignOffice.

Sydney-based eyewear company Oscar Wylee has recently opened their first Melbourne store, designed by the local architecture & interior design practice DesignOffice.

The store’s architecture reflects Oscar Wylee’s design traditions: the timeless and enduring values behind their frame design, delivering a space of calm respite required for selecting eyewear and conducting eye-exams.

When asked about their inspiration for the project, the team at DesignOffice explain: “The design response is anchored in an understanding of the Oscar Wylee brand, their eyewear, and the way you shop it. They are a brand with a very focused attention to detail, embodying a confident sense of simplicity yet something of an effortless and warm personality. For us this translated into the creation of a space which, on the one hand, is very clean and simple, yet is also layered with colour, depth and crafted details. The nuance of the timber shelving design and subtle layering of domesticity provide an immediate and tactile connection between the customer and the product.”

The compact store is expressed as a pair of adjacent rooms, lined with a gently curved custom solid timber display system. Walls are wrapped in maple timber floating above a base of mid-grey rubber. Stainless steel and white plaster complete the core palette balanced with injections of olive green, cobalt blue, and terracotta.

One of the heroes within the interior is the raked ceiling hood that sits towards the front of the store. “It was quite a complex element to produce. Many drawings and sketches were passed between ourselves and the builder to get the radius and curves to be just right, and to also ensure it remained thin and light. As the hood curves both horizontally and vertically it required a lot of attention to detail. We wanted it to feel like a porcelain vessel and the team on site did a great job,” explains the design team.

Having started off as an online brand 4 years ago, Oscar Wylee understand that the offline experience of touching and feeling the products is vital, as well as providing a complete 360 digital-physical customer experience.

“The store will help create an even more inspiring and fluid experience for the customers. There is a real connection between the details of the store and every single piece in our 500 frame collection,” concludes Jack Teoh, CEO of Oscar Wylee.

[Images courtesy of Oscar Wylee. Photography by Dianna Snape.]