Building with bars of soap. Making a scent the brand of a product. Ai Kato, the artistic director of the Australian brand Aesop, defends an idea: form follows formulation. It is his version of the form follows function that defined modern architecture. The form, in the store that this company built during the week of the Salone in Milan last April, was little more than a large container for bars of soap. These bars functioned as bricks and, attached to a wooden structure that, in reality, stored them, they created a space that, as well as entering through the sight, penetrated its visitors through the smell.
Smell, aroma, is the trademark of the company. This company specialising in soaps and creams for the body, hair care and also for the home, has a line of stores and packaging that is sober, functional, minimalist, says Kato. Their idea is to enter through the nose rather than through the eyes. Their presence, minimal and concise, envelops this will. That is why this temporary intervention, during the last edition of the Salone in Milan, celebrated this idea. The accumulation of soap bars formed aromatic, ordered, Cartesian and mysterious walls. Behind some of the bars – noticeably embedded in the wooden structure – were hidden the brand’s products: soaps, hand and body creams, facial masks, aromas for the home.
In the centre of the premises, a rectangular surface awaited customers who wanted to try the company’s line of care products. From the walls to the body, entering through the nose. A soap shop or boutique that, far from creating a visual memory, becomes an aroma. Thus, the minimalist is maximised and the everyday, barely perceptible, leaves the domestic sphere to evoke it from the street, temporality and design. A minimal, ingenious and sensory architecture designed by Belgian architect Nicolas Schuybroek (1981).
Raised in Brussels and trained in London, Schuybroek has built his sober and timeless credo by combining minimalism and senses. In Lyon (France) he has already designed the flagship store for Aesop. He has also designed homes and hotels in Chicago, Mexico and France. Two years ago he designed his own collection for the Salone de Milano. He titled it When Objects Work (When objects work). That is precisely what he did at the fair this year: he set up a tent using the materiality and aroma of hundreds of bars of soap.