PERFUME STORE

architectural

and

interior

design

studio

AREA

100 m²

LOCATION

Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek

Dates

Summer '26

WHAT WE DID

Interior Design Concept
Architectural Drawings
Design & Architectural Supervision
Procurement

Space

Fragrance is invisible, so the architecture must hold its weight. In Bishkek, this retail environment abandons traditional cosmetic displays for something closer to a perfumer's private laboratory. The design treats scent as modern alchemy - grounding fragile glass and volatile liquids within a framework of raw concrete, brushed steel, and pale timber.

The Brief

The client wanted a perfume retail space that didn't look like one. No glass shelves, no backlit branding, no cosmetic-counter softness. The brief asked for an environment that took fragrance seriously — closer to a laboratory or workshop than a beauty store. The product had to feel as if it had been distilled on site, not delivered in.

Industrial Alchemy

The project borrows the hardware of fragrance manufacturing — cylindrical vats, heavy infrastructure, the matte surfaces of mid-century laboratories — and refuses to translate them into the raw or the rough. The forms are brutalist; the execution is not. Pale oak softens the perimeter. Brushed stainless steel reads as planar, not industrial. The result is a perfumer's private laboratory rendered in the language of mid-century modernism: a place where someone serious about scent might have built a space for themselves, with brutal forms held in conversation with refined material thinking.

The Pivot

A massive cylinder of brushed stainless steel anchors the floor plan — static, planar, and unmistakably drawn from the extraction vats used to distill fragrance. The same geometry, the same alloy, the same hard reflectivity. Visitors move around it the way a process moves around its central vessel. The designer reference perfume manufacturing in metaphor.

The Monoliths

The central tasting counters are cast from concrete, their visual weight undercut by precise semi-circular voids. Scientific distillation vessels and glass bell jars rest on the matte surface above, emphasizing the delicacy of the perfumes against the gravity of the stone.

Presentation

Interlocking timber structures form the perimeter displays, arranged on a strict grid that brings order to the visual field. The pale wood warms the concrete envelope and creates a quiet backdrop - letting the amber liquids and minimalist branding command the room without competing for attention.

Material Selection

The palette is strictly regulated to avoid visual fatigue. Pale oak warms the perimeter walls. The floor and exposed ceiling retain the original industrial shell. A massive sheet of brushed stainless steel forms the central vat - matte, planar, catching light in long horizontal grain. Against this restraint, the hyper-reflective inflated metallic seating reads as deliberate distortion: one polished gesture in a room of textured surfaces.

creative force behind

Perfume is sold almost everywhere the same way - glass shelves, soft light, a pretty bottle behind a counter. We wanted the opposite: the place fragrance is made, not the place it is purchased. So we borrowed the hardware - a brushed steel vat at the center, concrete counters as workbenches, the planar surfaces of a mid-century laboratory. Brutalism in form, mid-century modernism in execution - a perfumer's private workshop, built as if he had drawn it for himself. The store opens in Bishkek this summer.

Liubov Tuzovska

Founder & Chief of Design