Behind a chiselled grey-green granite facade in Tokyo's Ginza, Casper Mueller Kneer carve the Jil Sander flagship from a single mineral idea, silver-blue travertine stacked floor to ceiling.
Casper Mueller Kneer extends the material language they set with the brand's earlier Jil Sander flagship, now scaled into the largest outpost the studio has built for the house. The shop occupies the ground and first floors of a Ginza building, opening through gallery-scale windows onto the street.
The translation begins outside. A textural grey-green granite, scored and carved into vertical staggers, is stacked across the ground-floor elevations like a quarry face cropped to street height. Gallery-scale windows and brass-framed vitrines puncture the wall, tying the shop to the rhythm of the block and allowing passers-by to read the interior as a sequence of sculptural still lifes. The entrance is a curved patinated brass panel, the only soft gesture in an otherwise rectilinear elevation.
Inside, the geometry sharpens. Floors, walls, stairs, and benches are cut from a single silver-blue travertine, finished either roughly honed or finely scored depending on where a hand or foot meets the stone. Two rotundas, one clad in pressed mineral aggregate and one in board-formed concrete, are inserted into the otherwise rectilinear plan as structuring drums around which the shop unfolds. The first room a visitor enters is given over to art rather than product: marble sculptures by Rachel Whiteread, banded with purple, ochre, and ice-grey veining, sit on the travertine floor like geological cores raised from beneath the city.
The store reads as a single excavated room rather than a sequence of decorated zones. Display vitrines, tables, and low seats are cast in sheets of recycled plastic in saturated orange, purple, and green, set deliberately against the stone's neutrality. Timber appears in drawer units and the marbled cylindrical stools that recur through the plan. Felt fabric, in heavy folded curtains and fitting-room linings, supplies acoustic softness against a palette otherwise tuned to mineral hardness.
A canyon-cut staircase runs upward between travertine walls, the steps slotted in like ledges in a section drawing. Light slants from the upper landing and rakes across the stone's banded grain, making the route feel less like circulation than descent through strata. A patinated brass handrail traces the wall, a single warm note in the climb.
The upper floor changes register. Carpet replaces stone underfoot, and the existing building's shuttered concrete shell, complete with Japanese construction markings and pinhole tie scars, has been uncovered, cleaned, and kept as the room's finish. Horizontal ribbon windows wash the rough surface with daylight, while board-formed walls and silver-blue travertine continue to meet without transition strips. The studio writes that beauty lives in materials as they age, a position that finds first-floor light falling on preserved concrete as comfortably as on freshly cut stone.
