Space Case

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Brown's Focus, a high-luster boutique in London's Mayfair district, is not what you would call a sizable space. There may be price tags in this shop bigger than the sales floor. But one reason David Adjaye is the hot British architect of the moment is that he knows you don't need much room for an exclamation point. So into this narrow shop he has insinuated a staircase of varnished particle board that runs from the lower level to the center of the main floor. Jazzy, glamorous and slightly disreputable, this is a staircase that's a force to be reckoned with, like Anita Ekberg stepping out of the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita.

To put it mildly, particle board makes for an unlikely luxury material, but give it enough shine, and--who knew?--it's more vivacious than an ocelot throw rug. Then again, coming at you with the unexpected is at the heart of what Adjaye does. "What I'm trying to say," he explains, "is that this might be the cheapest bloody material you can imagine, and it's beautiful." For the record, these days he's building himself a second home in Ghana made partly of mud.

A willingness to think seriously about the architectural possibilities of mud, a traditional African building material, is another reason Adjaye is the young wonder of the London design world. (Keep in mind that architecture may be the only job description other than eminence grise in which at 40 you still rank as a kid.) At age 36 he has on his resume a number of much discussed projects for some of London's better-known names in the world of art and design, including a house for the fashion photographer Juergen Teller and an addition for the actor Ewan McGregor.

Do a quick tour around London, and you can lean across his brutalist concrete-slab tables at the DJ bar Social or wander through the jewelry boutiques he recently masterminded for Selfridge's, the once sedentary London department store that has put itself back on the merchandising map with the hip redesign of its sales floors. A few years ago, the store's managers went to him looking for someone to cast a fresh eye on their massive neoclassical flagship store. (Picture the U.S. Treasury Building stuffed with designer boutiques.) Adjaye recalls their meeting with that impish smile of his. "I said to them, 'What you have here is a shantytown. I'm going to build you a city.'"

To build a city is, of course, what every architect dreams of. Adjaye is getting there, one building at a time. Earlier this year the borough of Tower Hamlet in London's rough-edged East End broke ground on his largest project to date, a library so up to the minute--with its cafes and retail space, escalator atrium and digital displays across the exterior walls--that the lackluster term library has been put aside. The official name for this place is the Idea Store. Directed to create a library that would be as user friendly as a shopping mall, Adjaye provided a design of interflowing spaces that he thinks of as "almost like a jungle gym that you climb all over."