Since 1999 we have been involved in designing places and spaces for commercial and social purposes, basing our thinking on three elements, essential for us: places, things, people. Having always as an objective the exaltation of these three values, we work focusing on the customer’s needs to create engaging, effective and aesthetically satisfying Retail and Interior Design experiences, basing our Art Direction on multidisciplinary skills, research and experimentation of never predictable design solutions.

Located in the Venice Scientific and technological park since 1999, Paolo Lucchetta + RetailDesign srl is a company of young Architects and Designers who, with enthusiasm and irony, work on behalf of the retail sector to innovate the area of fashion: home, food, style.
It has been defined a research and project lab distinguishing itself on a national scale as one of the most advanced poles of activity and thought, with the aim of proposing a new CONCEPT in Retail, Interior Design and distribution to face the evolution of international markets.
The studio makes research work integrated with innovative methods which lead to the definition of new FORMATS, mixing experiences matured in different sectors of business and able to propose work plans based on inventive and original research, to supply a strategic applied consultancy, bringing together a high level of thought with a wide possibility of operative applications.

Places, Things, People

Philosophy
For us, designing for Retail means thinking about suggestive places, able to create a connection between the things that are there and the people who live there.

In recent years, the disciplinary territory between Architecture and Design – that of Interior Architecture – has taken on an increasingly important role in the regeneration of individual and collective built environments. Internal space is a “constructed matter” and relating with it no longer means relating with a void, but rather becoming part of a complex body.
Interior Architecture is able to activate the public and private spaces of the contemporary city: it is the tool that gives soul and meaning to both physical and mental spaces, within which quality of life is defined.
Delineating the assessment of quality criteria, such as climate, quality of Architecture, public transportation, tolerance, security, environmental issues, landscape conservation, international connectivity, urban Design, the conditions of commercial development, access to goods and services, culture and instruction are fundamental.¹
“The growing magnitude of road, railroad and air networks overturns conceptions of city planning and the city, whose importance is measured on the speed with which it ensures access to different means of circulation and their interconnections. Likewise, the growing role of different means of communication, inclusive of television and the Internet, thrusts public life, extended across the globe, into the heart of domestic space.
These changes can be conceived as signs of a new world in gestation; a world, for the first time in the history of mankind, that simultaneously and contemporaneously spans the planet.”²
“Hence, we realize that new challenges are being posed to Urbanists and Architects. Increasingly, the most frequented public spaces, where social life is learned in an often-unruly manner, are increasingly spaces of consumerism, from hypermarkets to all kinds of transport stations.
It is necessary that attention to social ties and to aesthetics converge in these spaces, that the learning of the social and the beautiful occur simultaneously. This requires a minimum of public education for which all political regimes across all eras have striven through the raising of temples, cathedrals and castles. In our slow march towards that which one day will be a global society, we should not lose sight of the aesthetics of department stores and airports, of stadiums and highways, of viaducts and skyscrapers destined for offices: the civic life of tomorrow largely depends on these.”²
“Shopping is without a doubt the last remaining form of public activity. Through a series of increasingly predatory forms, it has infiltrated, colonized and even replaced almost every aspect of urban life. City centres, suburbs, streets and now airports, stations, museums, hospitals, schools, the Internet and military spaces are shaped by the mechanisms and spaces of Shopping.

The voracity with which it pursues public space has, in fact, made it one of the main, if not only, modalities through which we experience the city. This Master explores the spaces, people, techniques, ideologies and inventions by which Shopping has so dramatically redefined the city.
The beginning of the twenty-first century will perhaps be remembered as the moment when the city could no longer be conceived without Shopping.”³
“In Italy, there is an infinitely large world parallel to that of institutional Design, an invisible non-orthodox Design, whose creator-producers and products are of considerable social and anthropological importance and perhaps more deeply connected with people than their counterparts in the realm of traditional Design. Useful and useless products.
Spanning the entire world of goods and all the souls of common things, from the humble to the luxurious, this widespread set of objects is intimately connected with people’s lives – real, normal and affective –, conjoining triviality, expression and piety, operating on the range of all of life’s needs, desires and hypotheses, and on the very changing of life. It is an idea of change that comes from the masses, through the need for magic.
The theoretical, technical and craft scenarios in which this network operates present models of transformation of methods and product innovations that are highly sensitive to radical ways of rethinking objects and their market. We are in the midst of momentous changes brought on by the various brutalities and crises, including that of values, which finds every person reexamining his or her own place in society and reelaborating their fetishes.
It is hypothesized that precisely from this nebulous productivity, operating from tradition to innovation, a more expanded and varied proposal can emerge, one that concerns image, ethics and aware use of behaviours.
This hypothesis shifts the vantage point, provoking imbalances, yet it is fertile in emotion and spectacularity. Objects that breathe and narrate our memories, in a social and objectual situation. They breathe for their designer and their manufacturer. Not only do they speak to their users, they correspond with them. We ourselves are our things. We are things among things. And so, which things are we?”⁴

Paolo Lucchetta

① Tyler Brûlé, The Monocle Guide to Better Living, Die Gestalten Verlag, 2013.
② Marc Augé, Estia ed Ermes, Domus 900.
③ Rem Koolhaas in Francesco Dal Co, Rem Koolhaas, Elisabetta Molteni, Il Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Venezia, OMA. Il restauro e il riuso di un monumento veneziano, Mondadori Electa, 2016.
④ Alessandro Mendini, Quali cose siamo, Triennale, Milano.

We deal with designing retail spaces mainly (but not only) for the sectors
Fashion&Beauty, Style, Food, 
Arts&Culture, Hospitality&Leisure

Services
Designing Places is a complex work that includes different disciplines.

We have a broad vision on a field, Retail, which goes well beyond purely design matters, to embrace issues such as innovation, the progressive integration between the digital world and commerce, the introduction of new technologies in commercial spaces, the evolution of how we buy, distribute and use products.

We are convinced that a well-conceived Retail project actually materializes in a “vision” that embraces certainly commercial issues but, above all, social, anthropological, cultural and economic ones. Today –we think– a designer must know how to design a place for trade and meeting, but even more he must be able to rethink that place when its life cycle comes to an end or, even better, to conceive a project capable of generating in that place “Urban substances”, that is to trigger commercial and social processes that create both an economic and, above all, social benefit (urban regeneration) for the area in which that project comes to life and, therefore, for the community that lives there.

The creation of functional, engaging and innovative Places is an activity that includes a number of different disciplines and skills. This is why the professional figures we have allow us to respond to the needs that more or less articulated projects may have, collaborating, if necessary, with qualified external professionals.

We deal with:
● Architecture ● Retail Design ● Interior Design
● Art Direction ● Exhibition design ● Product design
● Wayfinding design

Main fields of intervention:
● Fashion&Beauty ● Style ● Food
● Arts&Culture ● Hospitality&Leisure

We believe that Retail serves, in particular, to generate “urban substances”

Memberships and Partnerships

We are members and we have made lasting partnerships with some important associations in the Retail sector and university institutions:

 

ADI
Association for Industrial Design.
Member since 2005.

IDEA
Italian Exhibition Designers Association.
Member dal 2007.

IUAV
Iuav University in Venice
Level 1 Postgraduate Specialisation Programme ReADs • Retail Architecture and Design for social and commercial purposes.

EIDD
Design for All Italy.
Member since 2011.

Green Building Council Italy leadership in energy & environmental design.
Member since 2009.

Awards and acknowledgements
They are not essential, but when they arrive it makes us very happy.


2018
German Design Award
Winner.
Concept design for the project Carrefour Milan.


2016
The Plan Award
Nominee.
Concept design for the project Carrefour Milan.


2016
The Plan Award
Finalist.
Concept design for the project Rizzoli Galleria
(Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan).


2014
Euroshop RetailDesign Award Winner.
Mercato Coop.fi Novoli, Florence Italy.
For a successful architecture and design, an integrated and consistent store-concept with clear message of the assortment and an unambiguous target group approach combined with a clearly recognizable corporate design.


2013
GDOWeek Retail Award
Retail Design Jury Prize
Concept design for the project
Coop.fi, Florence Novoli


2012
Premio Città Impresa
Fabbricatore di Idee
Winner.
Award to the 1,000 makers of ideas and development in the Northeast: entrepreneurs, young people, workers and public administrators who make the country grow.


2010
Premio Nazionale per l’innovazione, Rome
Concept design for the project
Ambasciatori (Librerie.coop + Eataly), Bologna
Mention of merit Service Design for having created an innovative retail area that offers customers the opportunity to combine multiple shopping experiences and cultural enrichment.


2010
ORACLE World Retail Congress Berlin
Finalist.
Concept design for the project Ambasciatori (Librerie.coop + Eataly), Bologna


2008
Euroshop RetailDesign Award
Winner Best Idea.
Design of the exhibition space dedicated to the Schweitzer company.


2007
DesignWeek Award
Category: Hospitality Environmental
Winner.
Project realized in collaboration with the London studio GBH during the opening event of the Puma store in Venice.