Christmas 2022: The Making of Our Window Displays

Designed by our in-house creative team, the 2022 Christmas window is all about creating atmosphere. The inspiration for the scheme came from a recent trip to Japan to see the Conran Shop Stores. Whilst there, the team visited an exhibition that was a fully immersive experience, transporting them into a series of different worlds or environments. “It was amazing how different each one made you feel and how your mind and body reacted as your environment changed. It is inspired us to create our own immersive world in the Christmas windows”, explains Mark Upstone, our Global Head of Visual Merchandising and the lead creative in our displays projects.

Mark continues, “The concept was centred around the idea of laying on the floor in a lush forest looking up at the leafy branches of the trees coming together to create a canopy of green, so dense you could hardly see the sky. This went through quite a few incarnations and variations to figure out the best way to bring it to life. We considered wood cutouts, real trees, felt shapes, but in the end, we decided we wanted to work with paper.”

The team collaborated with a longtime partner to create custom paper decorations for the windows, filling the ceiling with hanging paper fancies. Over 30 different shapes were created in three carefully selected shades of green. The Chelsea window alone has over 1,000 hanging decorations to fill the space. As Mark explains, “The floor is actually a photo of the paper decorations that has been through a process to pixellate the shot, so it feels more like a tonal shift through the shades of green rather than an obvious reflection of the ceiling. The mirrors at each end of the window mean that the forest is never-ending.”

The paper forest serves as a rich and inviting background for our new-season offering. A simple floating table sits amongst the forest to display the products, with a focus on furniture and lighting in the Chelsea store, highlighting our exclusive Groovy Chair by Pierre Paulin and The Conran Shop’s New Designers-winning Iris Lounge Chair by Huw Evans. The Marylebone window displays some of our key gifting pieces, including our kitchen and dining edit to imbue your Christmas table with festive charm.

Green really is the colour of the season, as the pixellated forest shot was also chosen as a background in our creative Christmas photoshoots. The green forest concept has also been introduced in all of our stores across the globe including our South Korean stores as seen above, with variations depending on the space and the location.