Delivered in partnership with Calico Wallpaper.
At a glance
- For: a luxury fashion house’s relocated store at London Heathrow, Terminal 4
- Where: airside, in the departures retail area beyond security
- When: the night of 24–25 September 2018; the finished walls were photographed between 02:30 and 03:42
- Product: a bespoke Calico Wallpaper mural. It is a non-repeating, painterly landscape, printed to the store’s exact wall sizes and wrapped continuously around the corners.
- Our role: specialist installation of the Calico panels
The project
The brand’s new store concept takes its cue from the painterly British landscape. In this store, the main walls are wrapped in a single, continuous Calico Wallpaper mural. A band of warm, earthy pink sits over a drifting grey-white mist, which settles into deep ink-blue ground with flecks of green and violet. A lit cove runs along the top, so the mural reads like a horizon floating around the room.
Calico prints murals like this to the exact size of each wall. That makes the work exacting. Every panel has its own place in the picture, so the horizon has to run level and unbroken across each join and around every corner.
Working airside, in a live terminal
Airport retail is one of the most tightly controlled places we work. The broad strokes:
- Security first. Airside work means vetted operatives with airside passes. Tools and materials are checked through security and accounted for on site. Deliveries follow the airport’s logistics and escort procedures.
- Overnight working. In a terminal that never fully closes, the fit-out has to fit around passenger flows. Our photographs of the finished walls were taken between 02:30 and 03:42, with the gate lounges outside empty.
- Clean, contained and quiet. We work inside the hoarding, with protected floors and nothing left outside the unit, so the concourse is ready for the first departures.
Of these, the overnight working is what our timestamped photographs record for this job. The security and containment points describe what airside work at Heathrow requires in general.
Our approach
- Panel order is everything. We checked and sequenced the panels so the horizon runs level across the whole store.
- Corners that keep the picture going. The mural wraps continuously around internal corners, so the landscape never stops at a wall edge.
- Clean lines for the fit-out. The mural meets a lit cove at the top and the joinery at the base. We left it finished around the services, ready for the shop-fitters’ fixtures and lighting.
The paper
Calico Wallpaper (Brooklyn, New York) makes non-repeating murals from hand-painted artwork, printed to fit each space. This one was bespoke and is not a standard catalogue design. Calico’s custom service is described here:
