Bright reflections

Offside Sport Ravenna is located in the historical centre of the sleepy Romagna town of Faenza. As the shop’s name suggests, it specialises in sports equipment, accessories and clothing. The family-run business, which is very well known locally, recently decided to expand its offering, previously focused on various sports clothing brands. A number of areas were therefore refurbished to display casual collections in a welcoming, informal and relaxed environment.
The store’s windows look on to Corso Giacomo Matteotti near the central Piazza del Popolo. Its integration in the town’s historical fabric is evident from the dimensions of the shop interior on the ground floor of a building, the characteristic distribution of space and the presence of plainly visible, antique wood beams.
To create an impression of spaciousness and turn the floor under the display units into an attractive feature, the designers chose through-bodied porcelain floor tiles from local manufacturers La Fabbrica Ceramiche. Large, 30×60 cm, rectangular tiles from the company’s Icon collection offer excellent technical performance. In this case, the tiles are in a sophisticated Oyster colour with a lapped and ground surface, and have an original marble-look texture with suggestive veining and shading. Laid on the shop floor in a straight pattern, they create a particularly striking effect. The shiny ceramic surface allows reflections to be created between different levels, just as a sparkling mirror can make a room look larger. The impressively bright horizontal surface obtained in this way is further enhanced by lighting quadrants suspended between the wood beams that mark off the distance from the entrance to the sales counter.
The shop sells various kinds of product and uses different methods to display them. The mannequins in the window are raised on podiums while along the walls garments on hangers are arranged on two levels. Stands carrying other display systems seem to « float » around the shop floor. Sports footwear is displayed on a masonry structure along the wall, with the various shelves cleverly illuminated by light beams aimed for maximum effect.