Studio Animal Wraps a Barcelona Sneaker Shop in Hundreds of Extruded X-Shapes

Most branded retail interiors treat the logo as a surface graphic: something you print on a wall and backlight. Studio Animal, led by architect Javi Jiménez Iniesta, took a different route for the Munich footwear brand's Meta Flagship Store in Barcelona. They extruded the company's X-mark into a three-dimensional module, then multiplied it into the hundreds, lining the walls, ceiling, and display surfaces of a compact 45-square-meter shop. The result is a space where architecture, branding, and product display collapse into a single continuous system.

What makes the project worth studying is not the spectacle, though it delivers plenty. It is the underlying logic. The entire interior is a dry-assembled kit of tongue-and-groove panels designed to be taken apart, shipped, and reinstalled elsewhere in a different color range. Studio Animal was not designing one store. They were designing a franchise system with built-in variation: same geometry, different chromatic identity per city. That tension between repetition and difference is the real subject of the work.

Color as Volume

Walk into the Meta store and the first thing that registers is not a single color but a gradient. Stripes of green shift to yellow, yellow to orange, orange to red, running with full continuity across the floor, up the walls, and over the ceiling. The effect transforms a narrow rectangular room into something closer to a chromatic tunnel, each zone bleeding into the next without interruption. In a space this small, the gradient is doing serious spatial work: it stretches perceived depth and makes the eye travel the full length of the room before settling on any one product.

Studio Animal understood that in retail, color is not decoration. It is spatial information. By wrapping the spectrum around all six surfaces of the volume, they avoid the flatness that plagues most small shops and generate a sense of immersion that photographs well but feels even more intense in person.

The X Module as Display and Skin

The Munich brand's logo is an X, and Studio Animal derived the entire wall system from an extrusion of that letterform. Each module is a small, stepped box that protrudes from the wall plane, creating a pixelated relief pattern. Sneakers sit on the cantilevered ledges formed by these extrusions, turning the architectural skin into the shelving. There is no secondary fixture system. The display is the wall, and the wall is the brand.

Look closely at the detail shots and you can see how the modules stack and interlock, each one a discrete unit that slots into the larger field. The stepped profile catches raking light from the track fixtures above, producing subtle shadow lines that shift throughout the day. It is a clever piece of economy: one component handles branding, shelving, texture, and acoustic diffusion simultaneously.

Dry Assembly and Franchise Logic

The most consequential design decision here is invisible. Every panel in the store connects through tongue-and-groove joints, no wet trades, no adhesives, no permanent fixings to the host building. The entire interior can be disassembled, flat-packed, and reassembled in a new shell. For a footwear brand expanding across cities, that translates to shorter fit-out times, lower costs, and the ability to relocate or refresh a store without demolition waste.

Studio Animal built adaptability into the DNA of the concept. The geometry stays constant across locations, but the color range shifts, giving each store a local identity while preserving the overall system. It is the architectural equivalent of a brand style guide: strict rules, flexible expression. That kind of thinking is rare in retail design, where most interiors are one-off installations with no second life.

The Storefront at Dusk

Retail storefronts have one job after dark: pull people in. The Meta store's full-height glazing turns the gradient interior into a glowing lantern on the street, the color shift visible from a distance before a single shoe comes into focus. The track lighting overhead washes the modular wall evenly, so the chromatic progression reads cleanly through the glass. It is a storefront that doubles as a billboard without needing signage.

From the exterior, you can also appreciate how tightly the system is resolved. Ceiling, walls, and display counter all share the same material language and color logic, giving the interior a monolithic quality despite being composed of hundreds of discrete pieces. That coherence is what makes the store photograph so well, but it also signals to a passerby that this is not just a shop. It is a spatial argument for a brand.

Why This Project Matters

The Meta Flagship Store is a proof of concept for something the retail industry desperately needs: a design system that is visually distinctive, structurally repeatable, and materially reversible. In a sector where interiors are gutted and rebuilt every few years, Studio Animal's dry-assembly approach offers a genuinely less wasteful alternative. The fact that it also happens to be one of the more photogenic sneaker shops in Europe is almost secondary.

At 45 square meters, the project proves that constraint can be generative. The small footprint forced every component to multitask: branding, display, texture, and spatial definition all reside in a single modular element. That discipline, paired with the controlled exuberance of the color gradient, makes the Meta store a useful reference for anyone designing branded environments at any scale. It asks a question worth answering: what if the identity of a retail space lived not in applied graphics but in the geometry of its construction?

Meta Flagship Store for Munich, designed by Studio Animal (Javi Jiménez Iniesta) with collaborators Marina Benítez, Diana F. Pareja, and Adfeco. Barcelona, Spain. 45 m². Completed 2021. Photography by José Hevia.

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