24 Feb John Lewis Exeter Refurbishment for Carea
Carea manufacture cladding. Simple and straightforward but effective and very stylish. We have done quite a lot of property photography and video all over the UK for this french company and I have only just understood that the cladding is resistant to graffiti. I just put down the lack of graffiti down to the fact that we video and photograph these commercial buildings usually just after they are complete. Brilliant, wouldn’t the environment be a better place without all that graffiti which exists just about everywhere.
Anyway here we were commissioned to photograph and video a new refurbishment project, the revamped John Lewis store down in Exeter. The £8.5million refurbishment of the 1960’s retail store by Midas Interiors and Glenn Howell Architects included two products by Carea, the Ardal cladding finished in Basalte and Neve.
The taller part, the eight storey tower is clad in the Neve finished cladding, stone coloured curtain walling which has a texture and speckle which was important to highlight in the property video and stills photography. The smaller part of the building to the side and rear is much darker with the Basalte cladding and stack bonded brickwork.
The best weather that particular week was on a Bank Holiday so there were lots of people about and I knew that we would need good weather and contrasting light to show off the detail of the cladding and the speckle finish. The texture of the product and the sparkle is shown off in the brochure photography and the property video undertaken at the same time in a single visit to the site.