ENTORA / Projects / A permanent season
Retail
A permanent season
A park and a 272,000 m² shopping centre became a single route that a family walks slowly.
- Client
- A leading international operator of family shopping centres
- Year
- 2018-2023
- Cycle
- Concept, engineering, fabrication and installation
- Environment effect
- Guides flow · Holds attention
A flagship family shopping centre. The client arrived with a brief for seasonal dressing, a cost that fades with the season.
ENTORA proposed the artistic line 'Fairy Forest': an environment that stays with the asset and grows from there. After the first season, the client commissioned the next. The collaboration ran for six years.
A park and a shopping centre, a single line
'Fairy Forest' unfolds along the circulation routes: 64 polygonal animal figures build a narrative. When the centre opened its own park, the line carried on inside it, and the park and the shopping centre came to read as a single space.
A family moves slowly along this route: the child leads the parents from figure to figure. So the family stays longer in the environment and passes through more retail galleries.
Footfall where it never used to reach
A shopping centre of this scale lives unevenly: heat maps show areas the visitor rarely reaches, distant galleries, upper floors and new parts of the park.
The maps were read together with the client, and the pieces were placed in the lowest-footfall areas. Each one was given a focal point and the route reorganised itself: families went where there had been no traffic before.
A second life as the evening draws in
At sunset, an open-air park usually drops out of the centre's life: in the dark it cannot be seen. More than 700 lighting elements keep 'Fairy Forest' alive at night too, and in the evening the route reads as clearly as it does by day.
So the centre gains a second peak: families come after work and school, and the hours that used to sit empty start to work for footfall.
A season that builds up
Each season 'Fairy Forest' grew: the new pieces joined the earlier ones. Over five seasons the seasonal dressing became a recognisable environment, one that visitors looked forward to well in advance.
The pieces are made with our own technology: geometrically precise assembly, strength at low weight, certified fire-resistant materials. The environment has held up through years of use, both in covered halls and in the open air.
Impact
The client came back for the concept six years running
Every season of 'Fairy Forest' went out to tender: only the studio that had shaped the environment from the first piece could keep a living one going. The client saw the return in its own figures and came back. A seasonal commission became, in practice, the permanent environment of a flagship centre, across the full cycle of concept, engineering, fabrication and installation.
- Total area
- 272,000 m²
- Collaboration
- six years, five seasons
- Pieces
- 64
- Lighting elements
- 700+
One route, six years, a centre with a character of its own
On a flagship centre we set out the line that holds a family all year and makes the tenants more visible. That is how it has worked at a leading centre for six seasons running.