Australian skincare brand Aesop has teamed up for the fifth time with Mexican architect Frida Escobedo to design the Aesop Park Slope, their third store in Brooklyn. The neighborhood’s mid-nineteenth century brownstone residences, with their repeating, angled facades, and intricate brickwork, inspired the design. These rhythmic patterns are likened to the twentieth-century textile artworks of Anni Albers—Escobedo has devised a kind of brick ‘weaving’ technique as a contemporary take on the traditional Brooklyn typology.
A corner entrance gives way to interior walls that weft in brownstone formation. Alcoves and corners emerge as areas of inhabitation and display; the negative space behind the walls becomes a place of repose for staff. In this way, the space’s choreography simulates the meandering experience of walking through the neighborhood. Escobedo’s 2018 Serpentine Pavilion in London similarly featured walls designed with Mexican materials and arranged as a “woven tapestry”.
