BODE Newbury Street
Physical Experience Design
BODE on Newbury is a physical extension of Emily Adam Bode’s menswear brand with a focus on sustainability and circular design.
Role
Designer
Tools
Rhino, Blender, Photoshop, Illustrator
Timeline
6 Weeks
Bode is a brand built on things most retailers overlook: the texture of a fabric before you touch it, the memory stitched into a pattern, the detail you notice only after you've already fallen for the piece. Designing a store for that sensibility meant every surface, threshold, and fixture had to carry the same weight as the clothes themselves.
Goal
Design a retail concept for 275 Newbury that embodied Bode's identity at every scale, from overall spatial programming and interior architecture down to display systems, fitting rooms, and material palette.
My Role
I owned the concept from brief to final critique, including interior architecture and spatial programming, material and finish selection, fixture and display design, and full visualization.
Discovery & Research
I started with the designer herself. Emily Adams Bode Aujla's work pulls from men's workwear traditions, domestic objects, and vintage fabrics, remaking them into something that carries history without being precious about it. Her own words set the direction.
“I want to make the beautiful useful again – what were both labors of love - practical in the home and in creation, and what was solely for decoration – have a new function.”
From there I looked at the spaces closest to the brand. Aaron Aujla's architectural practice, Green River Projects LLC, and Commune Design both share the same material sensibility: warm wood, objects with stories, rooms that feel lived in rather than staged. I used those as spatial reference points for what the Bode store could feel like before I touched the floor plan.
The space itself came with real constraints. Exposed ceilings, raw brick, an uneven layout with columns and level changes that resisted an easy solution. On Newbury Street, surrounded by brands built for volume and visibility, I decided that friction was worth keeping.
Concept Development
The organizing idea was the lifecycle of a vintage textile. Every garment Bode makes has already lived one life before it becomes something new, and the store needed to reflect that circularity rather than hide it. I mapped the space around four thresholds: Repair, Reuse, Maintain, and Recycle, translated spatially into Craft, Style, Care, and Learn. Moving through the store meant moving through the life of a garment.
The floor plan made that sequencing possible in a way I didn't anticipate at first. The existing building had two distinct parts, older and newer, connected awkwardly. Instead of smoothing that over, I used circulation to stitch them together deliberately.
A vocabulary of stairs became the connective tissue: different stair types at each level, each one evoking a different kind of domestic space, each one asking you to slow down and notice where you were. The stair diagram became one of the more satisfying problems I solved on the project.
The programming followed the concept through to its specifics. A Custom and Tailoring Studio anchored the ground floor alongside the entrance. Collections retail sat in the middle. Dry Clean, Laundry and Care occupied its own zone. A One-of-a-Kind room held the rarest pieces. At the top, a Gentlemen's Cafe and Bar with fabric waste sorting brought the cycle fully into view.
Every room had a reason to exist inside the larger story the building was telling.
Final Design
The material palette stayed close to Bode's own: warm wood, raw brick, concrete, and handmade tile. I let the existing building show by leaving exposed brick. Each floor read as its own room while still belonging to the same house.
The custom furniture system carried the concept through at the detail level. I designed a set of pieces built around how clothes actually live: a quilted display panel that treated fabric as a wall surface, open shelving that invited browsing over scanning, a cabinet for storing things properly, a bench for sitting and considering.
