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Thalia Flagship store in the Metropol Cinema

Place: Bonn

Category: Shopping Malls & Retail

The Metropol cinema in Bonn: built in the Art Deco style in the 1920s, destroyed during the war, rebuilt true to the original in the 1950s. Today the historic building houses a Thalia flagship store with over 2,500 square meters of retail space.
The challenges for the lighting concept lay in the historic building structure and in the high energy requirements.

The sales area extends over 4 floors, which are spanned by a skylight with cove lighting. The former stage forms the entrance to the sales areas on each floor. Ceiling heights of up to 15m require lighting tools with particularly precise lighting technology and high efficiency. The golden stage portal frame with ornaments of corn was worked out by a concentrated grazing light.

The design of the magnificent chandelier in the center is based on the time when the Metropol was built in the 1920s. It is also used for accent lighting on the ground floor and, with its Fresnel-like prism glass combined with highly shielded directional spotlights, represents a symbiosis of object and functional light.

Differentiated lighting solutions were developed for the horizontal and vertical product displays in order to highlight the books on display in the best possible way and to achieve good visual comfort for reading the blurbs.
Parts of the old cinema seating were retained in order to create atmospheric reading and lounge areas. The differentiated lighting concept and the selection of the lighting tools made it possible to reduce the connected load of the lighting per square meter by 50% compared to traditional approaches.

Central functional areas such as information counters and checkout zones were designed with a uniform, recognizable type of light on all floors. The object lighting in the checkout areas is based on an illuminated fabric cube for orientation in combination with a direct downlight for the visual task at the checkout itself. The large children's area in the basement invites them to play and run around. The color-changing LED light balls in R/G/B technology attached to the ceiling form a cloud of light and are electronically controlled. In terms of color, the individual balls of light run through a light scenography from sunrise to sunset that is based on the course of the day.

Location: Thalia Bonn
Copyright photos: J. Palm & N. Kober