In 2021, Moscow became home to a rare architectural and sartorial experiment: The Room, a concept store dedicated to the work of Carol Christian Poell. Known for his uncompromising treatments of leather and cloth, Poell has long occupied a place in fashion’s imagination as both designer and enigma. To house such a body of work required more than a retail environment; it demanded a structure that could echo his independence of vision and his resistance to ornament.
The project was entrusted to architect Ariana Ahmad, whose bureau has realized projects across Europe and America. For The Room, Ahmad was asked not to impose a design language of her own, but to strip the space into a canvas capable of amplifying Poell’s intentions. In 2023, a second level was added under her direction, expanding the initial 2021 commission at the request of Alexander Moiseenkov, the boutique’s founder.
Here, garments are not displayed as commodities but as artifacts: each limited-edition piece—issued in runs as small as two, never more than forty—is accompanied by its own passport. Access is by appointment only, heightening the sense of encounter. The architecture supports this ritual by remaining deliberately unobtrusive, a frame in which Poell’s explorations of cut, treatment, and surface may unfold without interference.
Furniture, too, participates in this dialogue. Two Brutus dining chairs from 101 Copenhagen stand within the store, their block-like silhouettes recalling the Brutalist structures of the mid-20th century. Cast in lightweight fiber concrete and hand-painted in layered textures, their surfaces echo Poell’s own experimentation with matter—his fascination with weight, touch, and process. A table from Friends & Founders’ 2013 Knockout collection anchors another corner, its marble and aluminium planes performing a precise geometrical balance. The untreated stone, matte and honed, offers the same sensory quietness that Poell achieves in fabric: surfaces stripped of artifice, left bare to reveal their depth.
A more sculptural presence dominates the center of the space: a sawn-in-half cast-iron bathtub, reimagined as art object by Ahmad and Moiseenkov. Along the walls, a small basin gifted by Poell himself has been repurposed as a display for the designer’s drip sneakers. These gestures—half readymade, half intervention—blur the line between fixture and artwork, reinforcing Ahmad’s description of the boutique as a “living” artwork rather than a static commercial space.
Every detail was developed in dialogue with Poell’s team in Milan, transmitted on paper and adjusted until alignment was achieved. The resulting store is as uncompromising as the garments it contains: silent, precise, and resistant to excess. In its restraint, The Room mirrors the values of the designer it honors—an architecture that, like Poell’s work, seeks beauty in independence, distortion, and the refusal of convention.
