MSA collaborated with WARDA, a clothing brand, on designing their new stores. These have been planned in various cities of Pakistan. Peshawar Flagship is the first in this series. Each flagship store is designed keeping in mind the idea that it will serve as a rejuvenating device for the brand. MSA has taken this collaboration as an opportunity to look closely at the retail culture of Pakistan in general and WARDA retail strategies in specific. These explorations helped in developing an overall thematic of the brand, where context becomes the central focus of the aesthetics of the flagships.
WARDA flagship in Peshawar is the very first project realized in this series of MSA-
WARDA collaboration projects. It is a two-story flagship store with a covered area of
6720 sqft. The layout of the store responds not only to the programmatic requirements of the project but also to the retail behaviour of the costumers. The design is used as a device that helped to identify and organize what a brand can offer to its clients, not the other way round.
The theme of this project is driven from the careful study of the city's history of its built heritage. From the choice of material to craftsmanship, the project relied on local resources while the project is dedicated to the contemporary culture of retail. MSA conducted thorough research of the built heritage of Peshawar city. The city has a long history of using brick as the main construction material (Bala Hisar brick fort and buildings of walled city Peshawar ) and wood as the main interior material. We have inverted this relationship by using wood as the main exterior material and brick as the main finishing material of the indoor walls. This shift of materials has given the flagship a unique aesthetic value and still maintains the same old traditional material pallet. The front metal and wooden screen not only reminds us of the traditional wooden exterior sunscreens and balconies (jharokhas) but also mitigates the solar gain and helps control the natural light intake in the store.
The decorative wall behind the long cash counter inside the store is created in wood by employing a technique of traditional decorative building craft of the area called “Tarsem Bandi”, where the intricate geometric pattern is made out of wooden pieces and negative spaces in between the pattern lines are given unique colours. Tarsem Bandi is usually found on the ceilings of traditional Havelis of the Peshawar walled city houses.
Another significant feature of the project is its plantation, indoor and outdoor. Peshawar, an ancient city was once famous for its gardens and jungles. A large chunk of the indoor space is dedicated to the plantation in a jungle-like arrangement. In the same way, a tree is planted in front of the main door of the flagship that welcomes the costumers and participates in creating a distinctive sense of place. The tree and the store both share a common continuance.
The overall project heavily borrows its material and technical sensibilities from the building tradition of the Peshawar city
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