The Los Angeles Design Group (The LADG) Completes 13th Surefoot Retail Store in Whistler, BC

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Whistler, BC – The Los Angeles Design Group (The LADG) has recently completed a new store for the ski boot retailer Surefoot in Whistler, British Columbia. The 947-­square-­foot space is the 13th retail environment that The LADG has designed for the Surefoot family of stores, including locations in New York, Los Angeles, Colorado, Utah and the UK. Their collaboration began in 2005 with the design of the brand’s flagship store in Vail, Colorado.

The interior of Surefoot Whistler consists of three large plywood display walls loosely arrayed inside the tenant shell. The plywood assemblies appear to be folded and bent, exposing bright red flashes of the painted surfaces behind. The deliberately imperfect fit between the new insertion and the existing shell

softens the transitional moments in the space, allowing employees to move easily between the sales floor and the machine shop behind it without the use of hard interruptions like doors. Surefoot is known for custom-­fitting its ski boots in order to achieve a perfect fit for each customer, so this fluid movement between front and back of house is integral to the service they provide.

The looseness of fit is carried forward at the scale of the furniture and display wall fixtures, also custom­designed for the store by The LADG. Although each bench is calibrated to Surefoot’s precise dimensional specifications for boot­ fitting, they are designed to appear mismatched in size and casually placed, such that there is not a wrong way to approach any available seat in the store. Likewise, the simplicity of the shelves allow for easy customer interaction with the products. Though the shelves are precisely placed and cantilevered, they appear to be manually inserted into the slots in the plywood surfaces without visible hardware or obstruction, enhancing approachability.

The custom-­milled plywood surfaces are covered in an intricate machined pattern that both provides a flexible way to hang the shelves, as well as a consistent backdrop for sports and athletic gear in wildly various materials and colors. The patterns in the display wall are designed to reproduce the appearance of folds in paper, as though a sheet that was too big for the store had to be crumpled slightly to fit in place.

Surefoot is located at 4154 Village Green #102, Whistler, Canada.

Photo by Bill Hawley PhotographyPhoto by Bill Hawley Photography
Photo by Bill Hawley PhotographyPhoto by Bill Hawley Photography
Photo by Bill Hawley PhotographyPhoto by Bill Hawley PhotographyPhoto by Bill Hawley PhotographyPhoto by Bill Hawley Photography
Photo by Bill Hawley PhotographyPhoto by Bill Hawley Photography
Photo by Bill Hawley PhotographyPhoto by Bill Hawley Photography

 

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About The LADG

Established in 2004, The Los Angeles Design Group (The LADG) is led by principals Claus Benjamin Freyinger and Andrew Holder, with offices in Venice, CA and Cambridge, MA. The founders see their work as contributing to a longer history of ideas, and draw on this history to craft unexpected solutions to conventional problems in architecture and design. The firm works at all scales, with completed projects in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, and the United Kingdom. Recent work includes a free-standing indoor-outdoor restaurant in Southern California and the installation of a contemporary picturesque garden in Loeb Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The firm has received numerous professional honors and recognitions, including 2017 and 2018 Progressive Architecture Awards, the 2014 League Prize from the Architectural League of New York, and multiple citations from the Los Angeles Chapter of the AIA.

Claus Benjamin Freyinger is co-Principal and co-founder of The LADG along with Andrew Holder in 2004. The founders see their work as contributing to a longer history of ideas and draw on this history to craft unexpected solutions to conventional problems in architecture and design. The firm has received numerous professional honors and recognitions, including a Progressive Architecture Award Honorable Mention in 2017 and in 2018, the 2014 League Prize from the Architectural League of New York, and multiple citations from the Los Angeles Chapter of the AIA. Mr. Freyinger has held positions at Mones and Partner, Architects in Munich, Germany, and Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects and Planners in New York. He holds a BA in art history from Boston College with a minor in fine arts from the Ludwig Maximilian’s University in Munich, Germany. Benjamin received his M. Arch from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2005. 

Andrew Holder is co-Principal and co-founder of the The LADG and Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His primary research and design interest is the construction of architecture as an inanimate subject: how audiences come to understand buildings as like themselves. This has recently included writing on the late Baroque architecture of 18th century Germany and the English picturesque. Andrew’s work has been published in Young Architects 16, a+t, Log, Pidgin, Project, Harvard Design Magazine, and RM 1000, among others. He is a frequent lecturer and guest critic at institutions across the United States and has held teaching appointments at the University of Michigan, the University of Queensland, UCLA, SCI-Arc, and Otis College of Art and Design. Andrew is a Harry S. Truman Scholar, an Oberdick Fellow at the University of Michigan, and a Robert B. Pamplin Jr. Fellow at Lewis & Clark College. He received an M. Arch with distinction from UCLA and a B.A. in Political Science from Lewis & Clark College.

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