David Adjaye’s first project in California is a pink concrete store

The latest flagship store of The Webster is the seventh store of the brand founded by Laure Heriard Dubreuil in 2009, and it took David Adjaye back to the early days of his career, when he used to experiment with pigmented concrete.

In fact, in 2001, he designed the Concrete Garden, which was characterized by a rust coloured 2.2-meter-high wall made of concrete. For his first Californian project, Adjaye has taken that very same approach to the extreme, by using precast concrete, glass fiber reinforced concrete, and cast-in-place concrete with a variety of finishes.

The Webster sits at the corner of Beverly and San Vicente Boulevards, at the base of the eight-story monolithic shopping mall. This latter opened its doors in 1982 and was renovated in 2018 by Maximilian and Doriana Fuksas. Thanks to its strategic position, between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, the center became a familiar landmark for the people of the 1980s and 1990s: its 82,000 m2 were the set for a chapter in Bret Easton Ellis’ cult novel Less Than Zero, and are the background of Bette Midler and Woody Allen's walks in the movie Scenes from a Mall.

But it looks like David Adjaye wants to move away from this stereotypical shopping mall, by designing a new and different retail 'experience' for the Miami brand: he wanted to build a community space, by exploiting the highly visible street-facing location of the Beverly Centre. The store occupies the ground floor of the Beverly Centre, but the communal atmosphere wanted by the architect comes from the store’s exterior, which also incorporates a fountain. A panoramic window made up of curved glass sheets allows the visitors to take a look inside the store. Under the bright Californian sun, the prefabricated pink concrete walls both complement and contrast with the white façade of the Beverly Center.

Once we enter The Webster's store, a sculptural landscape of pink concrete unfolds before our eyes. The cast in place concrete floor holds fragments of black cherry marble, while the walls have a smooth finish on the lower part and a rough texture above, with fabric inserts of the 1950s chosen from Dubreuil's personal collection. All the benches, display plinths and pieces of furniture are made of concrete, except for some metallic elements such as display racks and mirrors.

There is no need for more furniture in the store designed by Adjaye, who found great inspiration in the works of Luis Barragán and Isamu Noguchi when designing The Webster's flagship store. The result is a sophisticated and expressive work. But will its public dimension survive the traffic jam of Los Angeles?