Rs + Yellow Furniture Store

By Redazione The Plan - 11 January 2010

The well known highstreet brand names, RS and Yellow Furniture, have a new – recognisably Bolles+Wilson – store complex in their home city of Münster in Germany. The wide-span, box-shape outlet typology, usually the hallmark of outlying areas, is here reconstituted as an urban façade flanking one of the city’s main radial artery roads.
Three stores (RS, Yellow and Brands), with an overall store surface area of 5000 sq m plus warehouse and delivery bays, cluster round an internal parking piazza. One store closes the block to the street (Dorpatweg) at right angles. The brilliantly backlit supersign on the advertising tower that rises from one corner is a new neighbourhood landmark, in interesting counterpoint to the steeple of the nearby church (Dreifaltigkeitskirche) and other elements on the local skyline like the fire station tower and the stack of a decommissioned brewery. The street façade itself reads like a geological cross-section, the roof line dipping and folding quite dramatically.
The pedestrian and vehicle entrance on Grevener Strasse has a theatrically dramatic 12 metre-high canopy, an inviting gateway into the 2 stores plus bistro compound. The transitional space under the canopy further underlines the stage-set feel. Deliberately conical, it eschews the very idea of an ideal viewing point. Instead, whether from the street or inner courtyard, the moving viewer is presented with a series of scenographic tableaus. Streetside, the roof rises out of the volume on the left (Yellow) to cantilever over the other store. On the carpark side, it does the reverse, rising from RS to frame Yellow – a dynamic that plays with the words “mobile” and “meuble” (furniture).
Logistics being key to any outlet system, delivery flow lines have been carefully studied. The inner piazza is designed to accommodate heavy-duty goods vehicles of up to 18 metres. The whole complex emphasizes its urban context, wryly underlining, in de Chirico-like fashion, the...