HOFF opens first London flagship with El Departamento retail concept evolution
Architecture and interior design studio El Departamento, led by Alberto Eltini and Marina Martín, has designed HOFF’s first London flagship as a site-specific retail project that develops the Spanish sneaker brand’s store model. The HOFF London flagship store is organised as a calm, gallery-like interior with custom display furniture, a gridded floor “rug” mosaic, and an art collaboration that turns shopping into a paced architectural route.
Planned for a prominent commercial area of the British capital, the store signals a new stage in HOFF’s international growth while avoiding a copy-and-paste rollout. El Departamento frames the project as an urban response to London, translating the brand’s Mediterranean cues into a more technical language without losing tactility. The result is a controlled contrast between hand-made warmth and an industrial register, used to guide how visitors move and where the product sits in the room.
The interior reads as a neutral envelope that gives footwear and accessories visual priority. Circulation is continuous and legible, with zones defined through changes in surface, reflectivity, and calibrated lighting. The project includes one open sales space with a continuous display route, custom sculptural product fixtures in multiple sizes, and a central artist-made table that operates as both artwork and focal point.
Material choices carry the narrative. Handmade zellige tiles and natural wood introduce texture, imperfection, and a human scale tied to HOFF’s origins, while stainless steel and industrial metal grating shape the upper planes and technical ceiling. This overhead system integrates bespoke lighting and conceals fixtures to keep the visual field clean and contemporary.
Underfoot, a large mosaic surface laid out like a small-scale “rug” is set on a precise grid, answering the ceiling’s structure and giving the shop its geometry. Against that orthogonal order, the display furniture shifts the rhythm: organic silhouettes and stone-like volumes finished in a deep, glossy blue add softness and motion, encouraging visitors to slow down and read the room in fragments.
Art enters through a collaboration with Phoebe Collings-James, whose intervention takes the form of a sinuous sculptural table with a glass top. Positioned as an artwork, it reinforces the store’s tactile intent and supports El Departamento’s view of retail as a cultural setting as well as a point of sale.
Colour is handled with restraint, building from sand and stone tones before introducing targeted accents. Mustard yellow appears on the zellige and extends outward: an ochre ceramic lintel runs above the shopfront glazing while new stone portals frame existing openings, creating continuity between street and interior and announcing HOFF’s arrival in London with architectural clarity.
Photography by Alex Upton, with courtesy of El Departamento
https://www.eldepartamento.net
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