Prada Beverly Hills

Architect - Rem Koolhaas (OMA), with Brand and Allen

Ward Sellars worked with OMA and Brand and Allen on the development of two stores for Prada, one in Beverly Hills and one in San Francisco. Ward was the Principal responsible for Telecommunications, Audiovisual and Acoustics. The San Francisco store was delayed a few years due to planning issues. The Beverly Hills store depicted here was completed in 2004. Especially the Audiovisual scope was elaborate, but understated. We helped the brand and the Architect develop a virtual reality app on a special PDA device, which included a camera and a bar code scanner. The shop attendant would scan the barcode of the item on the shelf and then point the camera to the prospective customer, and magically the item of clothing would be superimposed on the customers body, even as they moved around. In the changing rooms we built in full height (1.8m) display screens with a camera facing the rear of the customer. In this way, the customer could see exactly what the item of clothing looked like to a person seeing them on the street from behind. All purchases were based on mobile devices rather than at a cash register. This was copied years later at Apple’s stores.