A jewellery shop designed by the Arnell Group invites Jacob Arabo’s clientele to mine the midtown Manhattan showroom for gems

Russian-born jeweller Jacob Arabo, who started out as an immigrant in New York City, is currently living the American dream. From a rough stall in the Diamond District, Arabo made his name (today they call him ‘Jacob the Jeweler’: no kidding) by designing opulent accoutrements for the celebrity elite — rapper 50 Cent, actress Angela Bassett and model Gisele Bundchen wear his watches — and by carrying on the centuries-old tradition of creating precious objects for royalty. Arabo banks on the fact that gems remain a must-have sign of success in a country that adores its status symbols. To represent Arabos accomplishments and to highlight the sumptuousness of his designs, the New York-based Arnell Group Innovation Lab used the diamond mine as the central metaphor for the Jacob & Company New York flagship store, which they completed last winter.

In geology, a stratum is a bed or layer of sedimentary rock having approximately the same composition throughout; in society, a stratum is a level of the population with a similar social, cultural or economic status. The horizontal organization (both physical and financial) of the mine lent itself tidily to the demands of a jewellery shop. The sleekly beautiful translation of the mine, with its veins and layers, into a retail environment was assisted by the Arnell Group’s clever use of Corian and computer-controlled milling to create three types of strata in the showroom for storage, display and lighting. The architects sheathed the 111-square-metre interior in striated panels that wrap the shop from the façade inwards. All horizontal surfaces are made from weatherproof half-inch (1.27 cm) Corian bonded onto three-quarter-inch (1.90 cm) sheets of plywood and supported by metal frames. The glacier-white Corian resembles, but slightly clashes with, the stucco façade of the larger building that it foots (and which was simultaneously renovated by the Arnell Group). The clash occurs because the refined texture and horizontal articulation of the exterior Corian dressing upstages the less refined, vertically orientated, faux-stone blocks of its turn-of-the-century host. None-the-less, the façade is unusual, beautiful and consonant with its function, and it benefits from the fact that the rough structure above it recedes graciously in the broad canyon of 57th Street, where it is difficult to take in the entire face of a building from the pavement. The single flaw in the façade — which can’t help but please the jeweller’s fans — is a large doorknob marked with garish colours that mimics the face of the signature, oversized Arabo watch and interrupts the transparency of the glass entry door. Moving inwards (the stripes evoke the blur of a panning camera), the wall pattern flows through the diamantine facets and creases of the shop in a single continuous surface (horizontally). Like the embossed striations, reveals between panels imply mineral veins or the spaces between them. Six sets of three panels — 167-square -metres in linear surface — exhibit slight variations in the breadth and depth of the striations.

Glass shadow boxes hem the long walls from the front to the rear of the space, and display cases are canted diagonally from the walls like jutting boulders or uncut rock. The veins of display cases inset into the walls broaden and narrow in height in the manner of mineral veins, but these have the hard edges and flawless lines of a cut stone. Although displays invite visitors to ‘mine’ the merchandise, a card reader embedded discreetly in the surface of each display allows only clerks to access the merchandise. The cases also contain quasi-camouflaged drawers that interrupt the Corian pattern only minimally. Walls, however, are punctuated by 50 flat-panel screens scattered around the room, displaying custom-made animation and advertising themselves as awkward holes in the otherwise minimally seamed surfaces.

Rooms behind the showroom, on the other hand, lack texture altogether. The ground floor encompasses not just the retail space but a VIP lounge with a built-in aquarium, a multimedia centre and consultation rooms for celebrity clients. Because the lounge is considered a separate entity— not part of the store and its retail strategy — its walls have not been striated. After the delicious texture of the façade and showroom, however, the smoothness of the VIP room seems bland and disappointing. The Arnell Group also designed an unremarkable series of architectural ‘accessories’ for the shop: mirrors, wall-mounted brackets and leather-clad ‘tiles’ for the display of watches, bracelets, necklaces and earrings, as well as custom solid-silver loupes and gem gauges. A strong, albeit simple, detail is the irregular, nearly arrow-shaped drop ceiling that features recessed lighting and vaguely echoes the geometries at work in the room below it.

To fabricate the skin of the shop, the designers first made sketches by hand. After diagramming the concept in both Illustrator and Photoshop and doing spatial studies in Maya and 3D Max, they made design-development and design-construction documents describing the Corian panels in AutoCAD. The overall dimensions of each panel were determined by the size of the original Corian sheets, as well as by the estimated expansion and contraction of the material and the anticipated dimensions of counters, window displays and LED monitors. “The use of Corian allows for a single continuous surface and line pattern to unfold from the exterior into the retail area,” says Peter Arnell. “And the varying widths of the striations were achieved by distorting a photo of light penetrating a diamond and then translating its prismatic effect on light into three dimensions in order to create variations in the depth and width of each line.”

In the end, the documents were translated into a computer-numerical-controlled (CNC) milling program. A team built the wood skeleton and plywood mask on which the Corian would be mounted before cutting each panel to size. After the panels were milled — and their sizes and patterns adjusted in a Bronx workshop — they were hot-glued to the plywood. Each wall, consisting of a few sets of panels, was assembled in the workshop prior to installation on site. Arguably, the flagship is a finer gem than the sparklers designed to woo the glitterati.