Profile: Carlos Virgile


Once a law student in Buenos Aires and now London-based and leading designer of luxury retail interiors, Carlos Virgile tells FX how he realised law wasn’t for him and how architecture seemed to be a better fit for his personal passions.


Fx

Words by Emily Martin

You've most likely heard of Argentinean born Carlos Virgile and you might know that he qualified as an architect in Buenos Aires before moving to the UK in the late Seventies to work at Fitch and then establishing himself as one of the UK's top retail and hotel designers. But did you know he studied law for two years before transferring to an architecture course?

'I realised it wasn't quite what I wanted to do,' says Virgile as we sit in the London office of creative agency Imagination. Smiling, he adds: 'There were family pressures because my uncle was a lawyer.'

Retail interiors by Virgile + Partners at Imagination for Harrods’ Luxury Rooms
Retail interiors by Virgile + Partners at Imagination for Harrods' Luxury Rooms

He laughs as he reminisces, and I imagine that the scenario presented itself differently then, particularly as I see his enthusiasm when he talks about architecture and his decision to study it. 'All the wrong reasons inspired me, I'm sure!' he says. 'Doing architecture was something much closer to the things I like; South America is quite European in many ways and culture is an important part of our daily lives. So design, art, cinema and theatre were my forces and I was always well informed, even though geographically Argentina is quite out there.'

He doesn't tell me, but I have it on good account, that his Mastermind specialist subject would be neorealism in Italian cinema, so I am interested to know about his many cultural influences. He describes a particular turning point arriving after he saw a Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, in the Seventies. 'It was an amazing exhibition, and the move to architecture, in a way, was a natural thing for my way of seeing things,' says Virgile. 'What I wanted to be, it was something that developed into other interests.' And one of these developments was setting up and running a shop during his student days.

Retail interiors by Virgile + Partners at Imagination for Harrods’ Luxury Rooms
Retail interiors by Virgile + Partners at Imagination for Harrods' Luxury Rooms

Selling furniture, design, antiques and products, Virgile's shop in Buenos Aires included items from Biba and Habitat and did business for five years until he qualified as an architect.

'It was very successful actually,' he says. It was obviously influenced by his ultimate choice of career, yet it was his move to the UK that opened up a number of possibilities to combine architecture and his interest in shops and retail.

'Argentina was a complete political mess and it was difficult,' explains Virgile. 'I had a brain, I suppose, so a lot of my friends and people in my generation emigrated to Europe or to the USA.' Virgile left Fitch in 1990 to set up Virgile + Stone, then a subsidiary of The Imagination Group, with Nigel Stone as his then business partner. Working on hotel, leisure and luxury retail design projects, Virgile says London presented more design opportunities: 'It was the Eighties and there was a boom, and I ended up in a place where a lot was happening. I was doing a lot of commercial design - or design and marketing applied to retail - which was completely new then.'

For John Lewis Home Visions at Westfield Stratford, now rolled out to all other JLP stores
For John Lewis Home Visions at Westfield Stratford, now rolled out to all other JLP stores

At a time when many companies were experiencing economic growth in the UK, Virgile describes it as a 'learning curve', with designers having to visualise selling spaces and design retail spaces for the first time. 'It was linked to the financial boom of the Eighties, and only when there is a real explosion of activity and financial back-up that these things can happen,' he says.

Now Virgile + Partners, the business is an integrated offer within The Imagination Group with a number of top-end clients including Burberry, Patek Philippe and Yves St Laurent. With its core business in retail design, in particular the luxury end of the market, Virgile and Partners has expanded its portfolio to include overseas projects as clients explored markets in countries including India, Russia and the USA.

For John Lewis Home Visions at Westfield Stratford, now rolled out to all other JLP stores
For John Lewis Home Visions at Westfield Stratford, now rolled out to all other JLP stores

Working with department store Harvey Nichols at its Birmingham location (due to open next month), I ask Virgile how is retail design changing - and in particular the role of technology. 'Technology has created a huge amount of panic for retailers and designers. That panic had led to a lot of bad use of digital incorporation - or not really knowing how to incorporate it into a retail space,' he says.

Virgile's approach to integrating digital into a retail scheme is by examining the practical side of shopping. 'Is it really useful? Is there a purpose that will ultimately help make that purchase easier? I think there is a lot of visual noise in stores that is distracting and not conducive to shopping,' he says.

It's difficult to think of new ways to provide that service, and technology can easily introduce a gimmicky dimension to an experience, which can be seductive at first and then die quickly as a fading fad. Virgile believes the solution lies in a personal service. Well, with the luxury markets I suppose it always has been so, and as we approach the much-anticipated reopening of Harvey Nichols in Birmingham it'll be interesting to see how its design has achieved this. 'I can't say much, but there will be the test of many ideas,' he says. 'The concept of luxury is changing, as is the approach to the idea of luxury. There is a more cutting-edge and stylish approach, which many fashion brands are doing, but certainly not stores to the scale of Harvey Nichols.'








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