The National Gallery Singapore and & Co just reinvented the museum store. Located on the ground floor of the newly opened museum, the lifestyle concept space, named Gallery & Co, comprises a retail shop and a casual dining area that serves organic bites, and seeks to engage museum visitors through its vast offerings. The gallery tapped creative collective & Co to curate and design the space. The retail area features platforms covered in grids, stripes and polka dots, while the cafe consists of clean lines and a green tile floor.
'Each space has its unique aesthetic catering to a different product category and customer type, ensuring relevance and engendering engagement. They are all unified by the custom-designed grey tiles and blue-grey columns,' says Yah-Leng Yu, co-founder of & Co and the Foreign Policy Design Group.
The retail shop carries both international and local fashion and design brands, such as French fashion label Kitsuné and Singaporean jewellery brand Argentum. The shop also holds special collaborations between brands and the museum, like the timepiece made collaboratively with Japanese solar watch company Q&Q.
'Our objective [for] doing the store was really to make it a living and evolving space, and the idea of the retail store was to really inspire people to be creative. That’s what the museum is for, to bring the public here, and to inspire them through art – and that’s what we aim to do in our store,' said & Co co-founder Alwyn Chong. 'That’s why we don’t sell the regular museum souvenirs – really [we] are about collaborating, about bringing people together, and about creating something special.'
With Gallery & Co, the museum experience is seamlessly extended into dining and shopping environments
Indeed, ’engendering engagement’ with the museum’s users is given paramount importance by Yah-Leng Yu, co-founder of & Co and the Foreign Policy Design Group
Shop and cafe, she explains, are ’unified by the custom-designed grey tiles and the blue-grey columns’
The outcome is bold and visionary, with the Gallery & Co concept space taking inspiration from south-east Asian art and culture
As well as special collaborations between designers and the gallery, the shop includes ephemera, books and clothes from international design brands including French fashion label Kitsuné
Local brands, such as the Singaporean jewellery brand Argentum, are also represented
INFORMATION
For more information, visit the National Gallery Singapore's website
ADDRESS
National Gallery Singapore
1 Saint Andrew's Road
01 - 01, Singapore 178957
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