Peace Frogs Travel is a hybrid space - a traditional travel agency office nested within a retail showroom selling luggage, books and travel accessories. When its owner decided to move her store after years in her original location, she came to Wolf Ackerman to design a fresh, new and innovative space to excite peoples imagination. The new space was narrow and deep. The challenge was to create a space that would allow both halves of the business to co-habitate. This required an architecture that was flexible with high visibility and easy accessibility while also creating boundaries that could allow for some privacy when required. It had to be a “both and” proposition - with each aspect of the business having equal footing. The schedule and the budget were both extremely demanding. We proposed a simple, single intervention placed in the center of the space that was highly figural and acted as an armature to hold both people and merchandise. Its a playful structure that was nicknamed “The Sideways Jenga” because of comparisons to the well known game of wood blocks. Its form suggest it began as a solid bar that was slowly carved away or had sections removed and sliced into pieces creating an abstract object which starts to alludes to a variety of imagery like a small street scape or a vessel one might explore. A sharp contrast of intense yellow/green and abstract white surfaces describe “cut” and “uncut” edges of the form.

Photography by Andrea Hubbell