muza | bookstore and office of Muza Publishing House | Warsaw | 2018 | cooperation: Borys Lewandowski | wallpainting: Tymek Jezierski | Vintage lamps: Borys Lewandowski | photography: Łukasz Kuś, Magda Rzeszot
Muza is full of books: new and old, big and small, hard and soft covered. And this abundance has to be mastered, catalogued and above all stored. No matter how much space you have it is never enough for a bookstore. This is why we invented special shelves to display books and hide them. The secret gliding storage is available inside each shelf so all copies of books at display are always at hand. Whoever red Jorge Luis Borges' short story "Babel Library" knows that there is no library without a mirror. Silver cladding of opposite walls of these tiny (25sqm) bookshop premises create infinity mirror reflecting shelves, but also making the interior more lucid. Shelves are shaped like books, and black book racks remind of verses, while books are like letters on its white covers. To light them evenly we put invisible lighting sources on the shelves and created suspended white structure made of plywood and bent like sheets of paper. They are like book pages blown away by a sudden draft!
No matter how hard we tried, there was always more and more books to store. But there was also a huge 600sqm office space to design upstairs and here our concept became pretty obvious. Why hiding books in a place that is all about the books? We convinced our client to free one room dedicated to storage and take all books from it to decorate corridors, a common space, and a lobby where customers are hosted. To make corridors more spacious we got rid of existing suspended ceilings and painted all that was above in yellow. Also to let the sunlight permeate to that space we asked the owner to replace standard door by glazed ones. As we managed to free a storage area we suggested diminishing one of the office rooms to enlarge a corridor. It allowed us to design a spacious central common place were all editors, proofreaders, marketers and graphic designers meet to watch football matches and have fun on Friday night.
