London is now home to gourmet food, sourced around the world and served up on pop up stalls to your watering mouth. At the forefront of the current trend are Churros Garcia with their intense range of Spanish flavors- the most famous of all being sweet twists of dough covered in cinnamon and doused in dark dipping chocolate (churros con chocolate). Their design is a distinctive as their product, using a flame-circled ruby frontispiece that signifies the spice in their dishes. Modern perspex and plastic fabrication techniques have been used by companies like Simply Plastics to create an eye-catching solid façade that fits across a simple gazebo. The stall has all the front needed to attract passing tourists, but also separates into its components easily for effortless deconstruction when needed.
Perhaps the acclaim for most innovative design must be dealt out to Brothers’ Suitcase Store. The team’s stall is an enormous model of a traditional hard shelled lather suitcase, positioned half open, in which myriad compartments house a range of sleek suits, men’s shirts and travel accessories that are all for purchase. Beside their attractive display they stack a range of vintage luggage, time pieces and carry cases which truly complete the look. The design is not only economical on space, as products are fitted ingeniously to the interior walls, but exactly embodies the brand’s air of businesslike sophistication.
Meanwhile, handmade and vintage specialists in the US, Besserina, trade from within a charming white pavilion with a distressed wooden façade on which is emblazoned the legend ‘where love is, heaven is there’. Inside, they continue the theme with hand-printed cushions, rustic farmhouse tables in pastel colours, a spinning wheel and pink and white streamers hanging from the ceiling. The products here, too, hang from the walls allowing you to breeze past a lace table cloth and spot an embroidered bag slouching on a supporting beam before making your way to the corrugated crate that serves as a cash desk.
Bringing the flavor of an Italian beach to London’s St Martins lane, through decked floors, brightly painted huts and whimsical parasols, is the job of the people behind the Dri Dri Gelato pop up ice cream stall. In their transparent, minimalist design the maximum amount of British sunshine is allowed to permeate. All this means that you can stroll up to a cone-printed ‘beach hut’ to order before relaxing with your treat on a pink beach chair beneath a Mediterranean beach umbrella. Relocating the Italian Riviera to central London truly is genius marketing!
Perhaps the most eccentric design, however, belongs to Kate Spade’s celebrated igloo on the streets of New York City. Pitched close to the frozen-over pond in the city’s Bryant Park, spade created an icy dodecahedron interior playfully juxtaposed with rainbow colors and accessorized with penguins in warm winter scarves. Her line of luxury accessories, including handbags and fantastic gifts for a loved-ones stocking drew crowds to the unusual structure. Inside, customers were given free mugs of hot chocolate and the chance to peruse products housed in giant fridges. This pop up venue only surfaces in the pre-Christmas period, but shows off some of the finest talents in the city’s design sector.
