Apple Store at the Jio World Drive shopping centre, Mumbai

Complete fit-out of commercial premises at a shopping centre to convert them into an Apple Store: technical installations, finishes and equipment.

The brief consisted in adapting and fitting out as an Apple Store a 1,465 square-metre commercial space at the Jio World Drive shopping centre in Mumbai, capital of the state of Maharashtra, the most populous city in India and the country’s most important financial centre. Empty joined forces with the Delhi firm Triumph Concepts to execute its first architectural projects in the South Asian country.

The intervention was carried out in a central diaphanous, double-height space rising to 10 metres with a mezzanine level, all located in the public zone, and a second level to accommodate a back room area. The works were undertaken with the shopping centre fully functioning at all times and therefore required strict coordination and planning
of the logistics
with the in-house operations team, which established the rules for access by personnel and the unloading of materials, as well as the timeline for the execution of all the construction tasks.

We sealed off the commercial premises with twenty-one panels of structural glass 10 metres high and 2.5 metres wide. The materials used for the finishes included Georgette stone sourced from local quarries and other materials that we had previous employed in Apple projects, such as continuous terrazzo for the flooring, although in this case incorporating local aggregates.

One of the most significant elements of the project was the installation of a staircase between the double-height ground floor and the mezzanine level: 17 metres long, it was conceived as a single piece of stainless steel with just two support points and a structural glass handrail running down both sides. The store’s suspended ceiling pays homage to the plaited plant fibres used to make baskets in India: it is composed of 1,000 hand-made equilateral wood triangles, each measuring 1.2 metres, which we installed to form a framework of polygons.