The shirt bar in Barkers' Lambton Quay store in Wellington, which opened earlier this year. Picture / Supplied
The shirt bar in Barkers' Lambton Quay store in Wellington, which opened earlier this year. Picture / Supplied
The Barkers boys have been busy. The menswear brand is about to open its largest retail destination to date, creating quite the ruckus at No 1 High St in Auckland's central city. Barkers' incarnation of the high-stud, marble-pillared Art Deco space - a former nightclub and bar in a Chicago-stylebuilding - is a grown up club house through and through.
Architectural firm AND, along with the Barkers' in-house design team, has paid as much attention to the building's heritage status as they have to those perks that make picking out a new shirt or suit infinitely more enjoyable: enter Burrs & Grind, the in-store espresso bar run by Eighthirty Coffee, and the Groom Room, a six-chair barber shop run by Matt Swan of Swan Barbers.
There's also a space carved out especially for made-to-measure suiting, and a smart edit of items from local and international labels, including McKinley shoes, Swanndri outdoor gear, woven blankets from Bruce Woollen Mill, Converse footwear and grooming paraphernalia from Baxter of California. Due to open next Monday, September 15, the flagship store looks set to appeal to those who don a suit for five days, and then shrug it off to go lake fishing on the weekend.
