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Maharam’s new showroom in the Pacific Designer Center—Los Angeles’s premier source for interior design—joins its freestanding showroom on Melrose Avenue as the company’s second location in Los Angeles. The 1,000 square-foot space was designed by architect Neil Logan in collaboration with conceptual artist Liam Gillick.
Logan conceived of the space as a “lightbox” presented with a luminous glass exterior, extensive white surfaces, and a poured seamless floor in neutral gray. In contrast to its surroundings, the showroom is decidedly minimal and its contents have been deliberately arranged so that certain features are only revealed upon entering.
Gillick created two installations of wall-mounted fins: rhythmic interventions of evenly spaced, ten-foot-high slats in gray and terracotta powder-coated finishes. The fins reference architectural shading systems like Le Corbusier’s concrete brise soleils and evoke the spatial dimensions of a building’s exterior.
As with Maharam’s showroom in New York’s D&D Building, the central feature of the showroom is a 30-foot long white partitioned table that displays the textiles in an evolving Mondrian-like field of color, pattern and texture. A carefully arranged rotation of thirty large textile panels creates a monolithic backdrop of tactile focus.
The Maharam Digital Project, Orange_Lemon_Chex, by New York-based collaborative duo, Guyton\Walker, covers the left wall of the gallery-like space. Drawing on the legacy of pop art, the wall installation boasts large citrus fruits against a black-and-white checkerboard.