Starhill Gallery is perhaps Kuala Lumpurs most iconic shopping mall, featuring an extraordinary array of luxury shops and fine dining restaurants. Sparchs design proposal dealt with the reinvention of the existing faade of Starhill Gallery facing Bukit Bintang. This reinvention of Starhill Gallery is designed by Stephen Pimbley, founding director of Sparch and the architect behind Singapores hugely popular Clarke Quay.
Stephen says, Unlike many street-facing malls in Kuala Lumpur, our new faade for Starhill Gallery is firmly engaged with the public realm and generates valuable visual connections along this section of Bukit Bintang via the heavy footfall. We have designed a beacon for Starhill Gallery that celebrates its relationship with the city.
Sparchs design has opened up the faade which provides a lot of visual interest via a continuous shop front that wraps the existing building in a crystalline skin of glass and stone panels. The new faade resembles the “wet drapery” of the ancient statues of Greece and Rome, and the beautifully crafted gowns on sale inside Starhill Gallery. The fractured variation of solidity and transparency transforms the street faade of the existing building entirely, giving it a new contemporary classic identity that stands out amongst the quick-fix, ubiquitous shopping mall faades of many of Starhill Gallerys neighbors.
Sparchs lightweight steel, stone and glass faade is the first of their kind in Malaysia that embraces cutting-edge faade technology from the French engineer RFR, the team that delivered the Pyramid at the Paris Louvre.
Sparch replaced the caf at the entrance of Starhill Gallery with an iconic triple height shopping pavilion for the French luxury retailer LVMH and their cosmetics brand Sephora. Sephora is, in turn, connected to Starhill via a first floor bridge that pierces the new crystalline faade.
Sparch, together with YTL, has deliberately crafted a complex building envelope using only the best materials that resonate with the importance of the buildings position and contribution to the streetscape of Kuala Lumpur. The synergy with high quality of the brands/products, as well as special visitor experience inside Starhill Gallery is undeniable.
Starhill Gallerys new crystalline faade and the Sephora pavilion have effectively established an iconic new identity for Starhill Gallery, affirming its position as the foremost destination for luxury shopping in Southeast Asia.