Stella McCartney Brand Book

STELLA McCARTNEY
STELLA McCARTNEY
INTERIOR DESIGNER
Stella McCartney took her abilities as a designer to new levels
with the London flagship store. The space, described as a
multi-sensory experience, blends architectural design with
recycled materials, nature, and the cleanest air in London.
“Someone said to me recently, ‘What I love
about Stella McCartney is that I go in and
I know you’ve done half of the work for me,
so I don’t have to ask all these questions, like
where was it made, how was it made, was it
sourced correctly, da-da-da…’”, she says. “And
it was something that hadn’t occurred to me
but, you know, women come into my stores or
into my environment and they know that I’ve
already ticked off a lot of the criteria that they
might look for and have to work much harder
to find in other places.”
The great outdoors is also reflected in McCartney’s
state-of-the-sustainable-arts London flagship
store—which she designed herself, with
a soundtrack that includes a three-hour loop
of her father, Paul’s, demo tapes along with a
Bob Roth meditation in the changing rooms.
“The audio is important for me,” she says as
she proudly walks me round it, “because it’s
obviously such a big part of my upbringing.”
There are papier-mâché walls made from “all
of the shredded paper from the office,” along
with a silver birch grove and a moss-covered
rockery of giant granite rocks brought from
the 1,100-acre McCartney family farm on
Scotland’s Mull of Kintyre. “My personality is
this sort of contrast between the hard and the
soft, the masculine and feminine,” says McCartney.
“I wanted to have life in the store—to
bring nature into the experience of shopping,”
she explains as she takes me up in the Stellevator
to the floor where she fitted the Duchess
of Sussex for the glamorous halter-neck dress
she wore for the wedding reception following
her marriage to Prince Harry.
Alongside a passion for sustainability and a
self-confession desire to save the planet, Mc-
Cartney has a more unexpected love—architecture.
She led the design of her store at 23
Old Bond Street —transforming a Grade-II
listed 18th-century building into a shiny
four-storey architectural experience connected
by a raw steel spiral staircase.
The design is filled with references to McCartney’s
parents, and her father even worked
alongside her in its creation.
But she also chose to take a sustainable approach
with every detail, including biodegradable
mannequins made from a bio-plastic material
composed of sugar-cane derivatives and
an Airlabs air-filtration system that provides
the “cleanest air in London”.
Image left: A sculptural spiral raw steel staircase anchors the space at
Stella McCartney’s 23 Old Bond Street store. (Stella McCartney, 2018).
Image right: Inside Stella McCartney’s store. (Stella McCartney, 2018).
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