City Music Experience Center

Commissioned to audit and redesign the City Music user experience from a traditional retail outlet at their old premise (Peace Centre) to a brand-new experience centre at their new location, we introduced a nine-gridded square overlay as a strategy to organize space into zones, making the exploration of the experience centre legible for the end user. Two central volumes anchor the project, one is a free-standing open island that greets customers at the entrance zone and another is a glass enclosure that houses a custom guitar archival room that anchors the centre of the space. The gridded approach is extended to the design language in the custom joinery, which sees a combination of steel framing and plywood infills. Free-standing merchandise racks are carefully located to accentuate this grid and form thresholds between zones.