Saint Louis Art Museum

Good museum shop design integrates cultural imagery with commercial activities.

For the Saint Louis Art Museum’s 600-square-foot permanent satellite location in Sculpture Hall, which was originally the Palace of Fine Arts for the 1904 World’s Fair, we combined the disciplines of architecture, interior design, fixture design, lighting, and visual communications to achieve a design that blends into the Beaux-Arts architecture of Sculpture Hall.

The Sculpture Hall Court acts as the “heart” of the museum complex, and is both the symbolic and actual main entry to the museum. The challenge was to preserve the heritage of the Beaux-Arts-style building, while combining the versatility and contemporary elements of retail merchandising.

Charles Sparks + Company designed the interior architecture of the shop, borrowing from existing architectural features found in the Beaux-Arts style in order to maintain continuity with the historic building. The result is that the shop visually blends into the surrounding Sculpture Hall through the use of matching color and finishes, and also through the retention of existing marble flooring details and borders. A formal, axial symmetry was used in plan to echo the symmetry of Sculpture Hall, with its formal niches and vaults. For the shop site, an ovoid plan form was developed within the selected niche to soften the flow of traffic and the merchandise perimeters, while also expanding the usable linear perimeter footage. We also decided not to interfere with the adjacent neutral piers defining the niches.