Omaha
Randy Brown Architects

For Bizarre, a boutique in Omaha, Randy Brown flows walls, ceiling, and floor into one continuous, sleek white surface

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	Photo © Farshid Assassi
	Brown modeled the interior from a single sheet of paper (above). The resulting built version appears seamless with its display fixtures and counter seemingly cut from one continuous material.
	Project designer: Randy Brown, AIA
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	Interiors for Modele (above) and Madame Suren (below) designed by Randy Brown Architects.

Omaha is famous for rib-eye steaks and corn on the cob, but not, it’s safe to say, for white-on-white boutiques with walls and ceilings that bend like origami and an ambience that seems more Midtown Manhattan than mid-America. But that’s what architect Randy Brown, AIA, created at Bizarre, a hip gift store in suburban Omaha that sells lingerie, clothing, jewelry, stationary, and glassware. He designed Bizarre and two other shops in close succession at the same shopping center. Each boutique had a bare-bones budget ($130,000–$160,000), yet collectively they refine a single design idea.
“We were looking for a way to make spaces, surfaces, and fixtures into one continuous visual experience,” he explains, “and we hit on using small paper models to simulate the effects we were after.”

Brown modeled the place with a sheet of white paper, folded into a tube and snipped with parallel slits. From this studio exercise came a long, thin Minimalist interior—21-by-77 feet—in which walls, ceilings, fixtures, and floors all appear cut from a single white material. As built, the project replaces the usual jumble of tables and display racks with a fluid surface that lends the merchandise some of the qualities of art.

Though Bizarre may appear effortless, Brown went through considerable experimentation in his two earlier shops at this mall to achieve such elegant purity. First, at Modele [pictured], an upscale vendor of imported leather bags and $400 jeans, the architect aggressively played refinement against rawness, juxtaposing smooth drywall with concrete and industrial metal decking, relieved only by two floating drywall planes. Then, with Madame Suren [pictured], a shoe and purse boutique, the interplay between toughness and elegance became more resolved and the level of invention higher. Here, Brown transformed a bulky structural column in the center of the shop into a platform for displaying shoes by extending the base horizontally almost to the front door—a move that presages the nearly seamless integration of wall and display at Bizarre.

This final store of the trio takes the ideas even further. Bizarre’s client wanted a clean, well-lighted place that would “look like real New York,” the architect recalls, with merchandise “jumping out at the buyers.” And she got it. In the long, narrow shop—essentially an extrusion from the front door to the back wall—the industrial aesthetic becomes nearly invisible except for a glimpse of the metal struts and return-air ducts in the ceiling. White epoxy covers the floor. And shadowy voids, created by cuts in the enveloping white plane, replace the bursts of bold color that accented the earlier schemes. As Bizarre’s floor, walls, and ceiling flow into one continuous surface, sharp corners vanish.

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