Project Description
Ever since Oprah announced that Sprinkles’ Red Velvet is her favorite cupcake, the Beverly Hills based cupcake-only-bakery has been looking for a space in Chicago. They found it on E Walton taking over half of a 2-story formerly single tenant building. The goal of the design was to accentuate the brand’s strong vision with an architecture that reflects the product’s specificity, purity, and quality. Being presented with the need to create a facade from scratch and recognizing its street presence facing the busy 900 Michigan parking garage, we took this as opportunity to create a signature facade: Architecturally it ties into the urban fabric of Chicago’s smaller scale architecture by introducing brick rather than keeping with the existing generic storefront system, design-wise it creates interest with a screen system representing a cupcake at architectural scale. The entrance is set back to create a patio enlivened by Sprinkles’ modern color palette and shaded in the summer, heated in the winter. The frosted glass door with the clear logo shaped view window allows a peak onto what comes next: upon entering the store one arrives at the heart of every Sprinkles, the Cupcakes Array, where 12 daily flavors are meticulously displayed behind a floor to ceiling sheet of glass. The minimalist white oak interior is designed to meld product and architecture in a unified whole unfolding as an intimate space capable of evoking the memory of European bakeries flooded with the smell of baked goods and awash in natural light.