The Galerie Véro-Dodat in Paris is one of the city’s most beautiful yet little-known covered passageways, nestled between rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau and rue du Bouloi, just a stone’s throw away from the Louvre.
A real haven of peace, full of Parisian charm, the Galerie Véro-Dodat boasts the Véro-Dodat brasserie and an eclectic mix of businesses that includes the Christian Louboutin workshop-boutique, the luxury footwear shop at the rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau entrance to the arcade with its magnificent, apex glass ceiling.
And it is that very same glass ceiling that has inspired a modern-day evocation at the heart of the flagship store of another global luxury brand, Sephora, as part of a multi-million Euro renovation project at its prestigious premises on the Champs-Elysees.
The vision belongs to Reda Slaoui, Sephora’s Director of Architecture and Design, who while working on the
renovation programme for beauty brand’s listed building, envisaged a thematic, apexed light canopy running the length of the building.
The reality is a stunning, 82m colour-changing canopy made up of 182 LED light boxes that was deemed the ‘jewel in the crown’ when the renovated store re-opened for business.
It is capable of multiple thematic animations, such as mesmerising black and white stripes that chime with the Sephora brand image (and the black-and-white checkerboard paving of the Galerie Véro-Dodat itself), as well as a rainbow LGBT Pride animation and a red, white and blue French tricolour-themed display among several others. New animations can be designed remotely and uploaded to the Paris store from the UK.
The recreation of a covered Parisian passageway is the culmination of a 15-month collaboration between Sephora and Unibox, which came about after Reda saw one of our bespoke designs manufactured for a development in London.
We, in turn, enlisted the support of Intecho, a leading provider of SMART building technology solutions, to devise and implement a comprehensive arrangement of lighting controls, featuring a bespoke software application for precise and dynamic lighting management, for both the canopy and the lighting throughout the rest of the store.
For our part, we had to create solutions to some complex and specific requests, such as lux levels and efficacy, the need to make the lightboxes RGBW, include access hatches for maintenance and take the store’s air extraction and fire suppression systems into account in the design. There was also a glass firewall we had to meet and then continue the canopy on the other side.
Even before the renovation, Sephora’s store on the Champs-Elysees was regularly attracting more than 10,000 shoppers per day – that’s about half the total that visit the Eiffel Tower – so while our canopy can’t be termed a mainstream tourist attraction, we can claim a place among the city’s most beautiful, covered passageways!
