Project Name: Canada Goose Paris Flagship Store

Location: Champs-Élysées, Paris, France

Design Team: Snøhetta

Total Floor Area: 297 m²

Completion: 2025

Photography: Ludovic Balay

Feature: Snøhetta's "Canada Goose Paris Flagship Store" demonstrates how innovative "boundless" architectural form integration strategies and aluminum facade materiality design philosophy fusion techniques can transform a flagship store dedicated to Canadian outerwear brand into a culturally profound retail sanctuary, reinterpreting the fusion of tradition and adventure spirit.

This flagship store on the Champs-Élysées dramatically presents itself with its robust aluminum shell, expressing profound meditation on contemporary retail space integration, traditional spatial wisdom adaptation, and modern architectural innovation fusion. Through carefully considered spatial organization and material selection, it creates a shopping experience that seamlessly weaves functionality with cultural poetic sensibility.

The project's most compelling design feature lies in its fundamental response and reimagining of the utilitarian language of polar shipping containers. A serpentine linear building structure serves not only as an architectural element but becomes the core of spatial organization, ensuring the building volume gracefully creates contemplative moments while preserving dynamic visual connections to the brand's extreme climate protection heritage. This design strategy creates continuous dialogue between interior introspection and outdoor nature, achieving a harmonious spatial coexistence effect.

Snøhetta's design language fluently expresses contemporary interpretation of cultural heritage, employing innovative applications of aluminum shell with mica speckles to redefine retail experiences. The exhibition circulation follows the circular form of the building, which becomes quite narrow at some points and expands to larger volumes at others to open up exterior space. This bold spatial modulation strategy not only adds experiential richness to the shopping journey but cleverly accommodates the complex functional demands of intimate art viewing and expansive gathering spaces.

Most remarkably, the architects create comfortable sensory experience environments between different display zones through clever manipulation of material innovation and spatial sequences. The foyer clad in French oak serves as a meaningful transition from the bustling street to the store within, Canadian sculptor Michael Belmore's stone fireplace sculpture "Smouldering Among the Char and Ash" creates the illusion of a dying campfire, bringing a sense of the outdoors inside. The Legacy Wall breaks up the polygonal form with its printed metal surface, opening to the courtyard with panoramic views or even permitting views through the building of the brand story's geographic narratives, creating seamless transitions between contemplation and landscape observation.

Material strategy continues this harmonious coexistence design philosophy between architecture and brand heritage. The aluminum facade features subtle mica speckles that catch light like sun glinting off freshly fallen snow. This darkened surface absorbs and reflects light with subtle complexity, its material homogeneity creating striking counterpoint to industrial rigor. Natural lighting conditions and artificial lighting bring the homogeneity of materials and architectural form into vibrant contrast with surrounding environment.

Sustainability and cultural sensitivity guided key design decisions, from the organic integration of durable aluminum components to contemporary reinterpretation of traditional spatial sequences, demonstrating how brand heritage and architectural innovation can coexist. The building cleverly adapts to different spatial scales through a flexible fixture system, creating recognizable brand experiences at locations ranging from intimate boutiques to expansive flagship stores while minimizing environmental impact.

Design Team Snøhetta was founded in 1989, with their first significant commission for Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, and has emerged as one of the most critically acclaimed and innovative transdisciplinary design practices. Named after a remote mountain in central Norway, the firm transcends conventional professional boundaries, engaging in architecture, landscape architecture, interior architecture, product design, and graphic design with equal sophistication.

Under its leadership team, the studio has distinguished itself through intellectually rigorous interventions in historically and culturally significant contexts globally. Rather than pursuing sensational formal gestures, Snøhetta maintains a disciplined focus on realizing thoughtful design visions grounded in deep contextual understanding. Their portfolio spans the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet in Oslo, the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion in New York, and institutional commissions including Beijing Library and the underwater restaurant Under in Norway.

The firm's critical approach has garnered international recognition, including the prestigious European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture, Mies van der Rohe Award in 2009 for the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, and Wall Street Journal Magazine's Architecture Innovator of the Year in 2016. In 2021 and 2022, Snøhetta's Forite Tiles won Dezeen's Sustainable Design of the Year, while the wayfinding system for Le Monde Group Headquarters was acknowledged with the Monocle Design Awards.

The firm's design philosophy emphasizes that architecture should transcend surface form, creating places where societies connect with each other and the world around them through dialogue and diversity. Through careful orchestration of volume, light, materiality, and spatial sequence, Snøhetta believes the best design results from comprehensive strategies through rigorous conceptual intent, deep understanding of historical and cultural context, and attention to detail. Snøhetta believes architecture should transform collective identity into contemporary spatial experiences, creating unique site-responsive works through strategic spatial organization and material selection.

Beyond practice, through thoughtful integration of environmental and cultural sensitivity, current sustainability strategies application, and time-tested design principles, Snøhetta has established itself as a significant contributor to contemporary global architectural discourse, creating design works that are both functional and embrace spatial poetry and cultural depth. The firm currently has over 300 employees from 40 nations, operating across seven regional studios in Oslo, New York, Innsbruck, Paris, Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen, occupying a unique position, focusing on creating culturally rooted, elegant, and innovative spatial experiences.