From fabric to stone: Gert-Johan Coetzee redefines luxury retail with marble and porcelain

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The internationally recognised South African designer has built his career around understanding materials — how fabric moves, falls, catches light and changes the way a garment feels. But when he designed his first physical boutique at the Winifred Mandela Precinct in Johannesburg, the material palette changed from fabric to stone.

The thinking, however, remained remarkably similar.

“For me, it was a shift from the body to the environment,” says Coetzee. “In fashion, material responds to movement, proportion and the human form. In a space, material has to create that same emotional response through scale, surface, light and permanence.”

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The result highlights a broader shift in luxury retail, where stores are increasingly expected to function as extensions of the brand rather than simply spaces in which products are displayed and transactions completed.

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For a fashion label, the store can establish a brand's identity before a customer has interacted with a garment, shaping perceptions around quality, craftsmanship and positioning through architecture, materials, lighting and spatial design.

Designing the store around the material

Rather than beginning with a question of which stone he preferred, Coetzee approached the project by considering what the materials needed to achieve within the space.

Veining could introduce movement across a large surface. Texture could change how light behaves. Scale could make a material feel dramatic or understated, while reflection could introduce energy into an environment.

It is a process that mirrors the way fashion designers work with textiles.

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Coetzee describes marble and porcelain as “architectural textiles”, drawing a direct connection between the material decisions made in a garment and those made in a retail environment.

“A designer would never choose a fabric simply because it looked beautiful folded on a table,” he says. “They would want to know what happens when it is cut. How it falls. Whether it holds its shape. What it does when someone moves.”

The same principle applies to the store. Materials need to work with the merchandise, customer movement and changing visual displays while creating an environment that remains relevant as collections evolve.

The store as a long-term brand asset

Unlike the clothing on display, the architecture is not constantly changing.

New collections will arrive, colours and silhouettes will shift and visual merchandising will be updated. The physical environment needs to provide continuity through those changes.

“Fashion is transient by nature while stone suggests endurance and memory,” says Coetzee. “One changes with the body and with time, while the other anchors a space.”

That permanence makes the material choices particularly important in a retail environment.

A surface does not necessarily need to dominate a store to influence how it is experienced. It can establish proportions, create rhythm, connect different areas or provide a visual backdrop that allows merchandise to take centre stage.

For luxury retailers and independent fashion brands alike, this makes store design part of the broader brand proposition. The physical environment becomes another touchpoint through which customers encounter the values the brand wants to communicate.

When materials start shaping the design

The materials selected for Coetzee's boutique included Infinity Surfaces Taj Mahal flooring and Perlato Olympo marble surfaces, forming part of the overall interior composition.

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But, as often happens when designers work closely with materials, the process did not simply involve selecting surfaces to execute a predetermined concept. The materials themselves began influencing the final design.

Coetzee says the process is similar to discovering an unexpected fabric during the development of a collection.

“You begin with an idea, discover a fabric you hadn’t expected and suddenly the silhouette changes,” he says. “The original idea isn’t lost. It evolves because of what the material made possible.”

He adds: “A strong concept gives you direction but materiality often reveals possibilities that you could not have imagined at the beginning. As we explored the Interslab materials, new possibilities for the space emerged.”

From product display to brand environment

For Interslab marketing manager Chad Raats, the collaboration also changed the starting point for the material conversation.

“Gert was interested in what the surfaces could bring to the space. How they could connect mood, add weight, work with the clothes and become part of the architecture,” says Raats. “That gave us a very different starting point. We were designing with stone.”

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The boutique marks the beginning of Interslab's Crafting Extraordinary collaboration with Coetzee, bringing together creative design and material expertise.

For Coetzee, the objective extends beyond creating an aesthetically appealing shop.

He wanted customers to understand something about the brand before they had touched a garment: precision, confidence and craftsmanship.

“Luxury, for me, is not simply about opulence,” he says. “It is about the quality of every decision.”

That idea is increasingly relevant to physical retail as brands compete for attention in a market where customers can discover and purchase products digitally.

A physical store offers something an online product page cannot replicate: the ability to communicate a brand through scale, texture, movement, light and space.

For fashion brands, that makes the store more than a point of sale. It becomes a three-dimensional expression of the brand itself.

In Coetzee's case, the transition from fabric to stone demonstrates how that expression can be built through the same principles that underpin fashion design — understanding material, creating proportion and knowing when a surface should make a statement and when it should simply allow the product to speak.

The clothes may change with every collection. The store's job is to create the world in which those collections can continue to feel at home.