04. Dec 2020

Bronze-colored metal mesh for Hermès flagship store

The ICONSIAM shopping center in Bangkok has quickly become the country's new landmark. In the Hermès flagship store located there, architects RDAI created a free-hanging curved interior façade made of 815 square meters of bronze-coated GKD Sambesi metal mesh.

Covering a sales area of 525,000 square meters, the ICONSIAM mega complex combines exclusive shopping pleasure with an extensive offering of artistic, cultural, gastronomic, and lifestyle attractions. The French luxury brand Hermès is represented with a two-story flagship store covering 368 square meters in the Iconluxe luxury wing of the prestige mall. The visual highlight of the store is a hanging fully-glazed façade, which is one of the largest of its kind in the world. In order to permit an unencumbered view of the outdoors while retaining a sense of privacy while shopping, the architects RDAI decided on a hanging interior façade made of GKD metal mesh, which visually connects the two floors of the store. A particular challenge for the fabric was to compensate the height difference of up to twelve centimeters caused by the curved and inclined façade. The exact dimensional accuracy and angularity of the woven metal panels that this required called for special solutions when it came to cutting and assembly. The procedure newly developed by the GKD specialists makes it possible to mount the large-format panels in a curve in lengths and widths calibrated exactly to the shape of the windows. A total of 815 square meters of bronze-coated Sambesi stainless steel mesh were used for the interior façade. 56 panels, each 7,000 millimeters long and between 1,200 and 2,500 millimeters wide, were cut at right angles at the top and individually cut to size at an angle at the bottom. They were fastened with flat profiles so that the ceiling-high fabric panels overlapped at a distance of 50 centimeters from the façade at the top and were fastened to the floor without tension. The transparency of the curtain-like interior façade, which is typical of the material, lends the prestigious store an open, communicative atmosphere.