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ISUAL merchandising is the art and science of attracting and engaging potential retail customers. It’s all about creating a visual narrative,” says Rupert Smith, co-owner of VM Central & Olive Studio, South Africa’s only accredited visual merchandising school.
While their portfolio includes work for brands such as Harley-Davidson and Heineken, it’s hard to imagine a more distilled demonstration of what he means than his own living space.
His compact loft is infinitely more than the sum of its parts — in Smith’s hands, the industrial steel and concrete space breathes with life and vibrancy. It’s both dramatic and nurturing, streamlined and layered: a sublime balancing act in which contradictory elements find coherence and consistency and come together to create a narrative world with its own internal logic and character.
“I was drawn to the industrial elements, like the steel windows and staircase, and to the volume, but I didn’t want a soulless, run-of-the-mill modern, cold space,” says Smith. “What I also liked was the sense of life unfolding all around me (the block and the surrounding area hosts both residential and commercial units). The bigger context is one of people working, playing, living, resting, retreating, entertaining, and I wanted to bring this multidimensionality into the heart of my home.”
The biggest drawcard for Smith was the interplay between the loft’s airy volume and its abundance of natural light. “With this in place, I knew I had the essential elements for my own canvas,” he says. When it came to that “canvas”, Smith followed his own golden rules. “First, I start with a black and white frame and then build and layer from there,” he says. While it might seem counter-intuitive, the dramatic black feature walls neither shrink the space nor add any sense of confinement — thanks to the swathe of glass windows, the natural light, and the clever way Smith built over the monochromatic base.
Maximising available light is another design rule Smith swears by, and it’s masterfully achieved in this loft. “It becomes about texture, gloss and reflective surfaces,” he says — and it’s to this end that one of the apartment’s most dominant features is the ongoing repetition of glass vessels and glossy finishes.
On every available surface and at every level, these refract and accentuate light, shining and drawing the eye while extending the spatial footprint by linking the interior to the outside and drawing coherent relationships between items from disparate contexts. The gleaming leather of a mid-century modern Scandinavian lounge suite happily coexists with the marble sheen of an antique French table; burnished wood corresponds with glistening metal; the patina of the porcelain tiles forges a relationship with polished brass and chrome.
Another powerful layer is added by greenery and plants — a direct counterpoint to the bones of the building. The lustre of leaves amplifies the light, as well as turning the notion of a sterile, urban industrial space on its head by imbuing the loft with the feeling of a lush and welcoming oasis.
The abundance of greenery and light underpins everything and is enhanced by its juxtaposition with a deeper layer of rougher textures — the hessian artwork against the black wall in the living area, the throws in the mezzanine bedroom, and the sumptuous natural pile of the white fleece rugs.
The last layer is that of meticulous detail. “My son, Hero, 13, says our home is like a museum,” says Smith, pointing to groupings of interesting objects that punctuate and add depth throughout the loft. Most notable of these are the taxidermied birds which add a playfully macabre note to the lush oasis. “I’m obsessed with birds,” says Smith. “And I’ve always been a bit of a Goth.”
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