Aēsop

The story of Aesop’s second Spitalfields incarnation is one of serendipity. While searching for vintage furniture for another project, the brand’s design team encountered the remnants of an extraordinary architectural frieze by British polymath Paul Mount. Made in 1984 for Leo’s Supermarket in Falmouth, Cornwall, the sculpture is a grid of repeating, abstract fibreglass forms in high relief. Each pod is one of five different casts, rotated individually to create a vast shadowwall. Sixty of the original two hundred modules had been saved from a skip by a passionate product designer from Falmouth, who had failed to get the entire frieze heritage listed. While the online listing suggested that the pieces were sold out, Aesop’s indefatigable designers discovered that some were, rather, languishing in the garage of the collector. After much searching, the team found the necessary contact details of the Mount enthusiast, who was seduced by the idea of giving the modules a permanent second life within Aesop’s Spitalfields space.

In the store, the geometric volumes—restored in alabaster white—become a striking interior skin, fixed to the walls with a light metal structure…