New Work: Jimlar

Lorenzo Apicella has designed a 13,500-square-foot showroom for the footwear company Jimlar on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, in the heart of New York’s luxury retail district. With James Biber’s team facilitating the design and construction, Apicella was able to overcome the challenges of a low ceiling and deep footprint to create a sophisticated showroom of seven private view galleries held together by a large central space that contains a reception area, a lounge and an island meeting room.

The galleries ring the showroom, taking advantage of its perimeter natural light, while the central space is a southwest-oriented linear layout with canted walls that draw visitors towards the windows of Fifth Avenue. Three round, backlit ceiling lights add height and airiness to the space, while complementary colors and materials such as walnut floors, chalk white and dove gray walls, and furniture from B&B Italia lighten the showroom’s deep footprint.

“The arced and canted walls and the subtle curves of the island meeting room were inspired by the spare lines of classic shoe designs,” says Apicella.

Founded in 1956, Jimlar is a New York-based footwear company that designs, sources, markets and distributes a broad range of footwear and related accessory products. As the footwear licensee of Coach and Calvin Klein, as well as the owner of legendary American boot maker Frye, the company has a substantial share of the premium footwear market in America. An important part of Jimlar’s activities is that it is also a leader in providing design and sourcing services to many other companies. With its own in-house design team and worldwide sourcing organization, the company has long been a valued footwear supplier to others. For this reason, the company needed a sophisticated, but also highly functional, showroom in which to showcase the brands it represents.

The central space has been designed to both express Jimlar’s visual identity and to mediate between the widely divergent identities of the brands around it. Its focus is the island meeting room shaped by primary routes to the galleries around it. A large sliding door allows it to stay open to the larger space when desired, while a wall of vertical louvers allows daylight to penetrate the room, while maintaining privacy to it.

Of the seven individual galleries, five are dedicated to specific brands and the other two are reserved for private label showings. Each gallery has been individually designed to reflect the brands’ specific aesthetic. For instance, the Calvin Klein gallery is modern and minimal, the Coach gallery is more crafted in its clean finishes, and the gallery for Frye reflects the vernacular Americana the brand represents.

As a wholesale showroom, buyers come to Jimlar to choose their next season’s footwear collections. Whatever the brand, there is a sales function that each gallery has to perform. The functional workings of each gallery are therefore broadly similar across those brands — salespeople present the latest collections to groups of select buyers, while models on the floor walk the individual designs. Each gallery therefore has open and closed showrooms with varying lengths of spotlit adjustable shelving fronted by long low tables that give buyers clear visibility of the displays and floor models. These generic elements are each then customized in materials and finishes appropriate to the brands they carry.

Project Team: Lorenzo Apicella, partner-in-charge; James Biber, partner; Matthew Clare, associate; Michael Zweck-Bronner, associate; Anders Carpenter; Dan Maxfield.