Nina+Co’s Circular Eyewear Store for Monc Treats Every Material as an Asset, Not a Consumable.

Most retail interiors are built to be binned. The lease runs out, the brand refreshes, and a skip fills with glued joinery and laminated board that can’t be pulled apart. So we find it thrilling that the boldest decision in Monc’s new Covent Garden store is one no customer will ever see. Nina+Co planned the strip-out before the doors opened.

This is the London eyewear brand’s second store after Marylebone, and again the work of Nina Woodcroft’s studio. Longtime readers may remember Nina+Co from Silo, the zero-waste restaurant of seaweed pendants and mycelium furniture we covered in 2022. Monc’s Freddie Elborne set the bar high: “For Monmouth Street, we wanted to push our use of reclaimed and regeneratively sourced materials as far as possible, whilst supporting British makers.”

It started with an audit of what was already on site. Lighting components were salvaged, and the aluminium stair nosings were melted down and recast as drawer handles and lamp dials.

The real headline is the balustrade, its translucent panels flecked with used prescription and demonstration lenses Monc had collected over ten years. Lenses are mixed plastics that aren’t municipally recycled, so most end up incinerated. Smile Materials (formerly Smile Plastics, who also made Silo’s bartop) developed the panel for the project, and when Monc’s stockpile fell short, other opticians and lens partner Zeiss helped make up the volume. The panel can be reprocessed again, which points to a broader fix for lens waste in the UK. Leftovers went into wall lights handmade by Atelier Wa Ma and Nina, with switches cast from the salvaged aluminium.

Coffee Grounds & Circuit Boards: The Unexpected Materials Behind This New Lighting Collection.

Mater launches its first lighting collection designed by OEO Studio, made from a patented material made from recycled electronic waste and coffee shell residue.

Underfoot, Blueridge Flooring made a parquet from a reclaimed Douglas fir beam out of a Staffordshire barn, the finger size chosen for the least waste, laid in large panels that can be lifted and reused. Joinery by Craftworks Productions is regeneratively grown British larch from mixed broadleaf forests. A low globe pendant coated in pine resin was made in public view around the corner in Neal’s Yard by Jacob Marks and Nina+Co.

Then the properly radical bit. No veneers, no laminates and no permanently bonding adhesives, so every material can be separated later. Even the full-height mirrors are mechanically fixed so they come off whole. Glue is quicker and cheaper. Holding out against it takes more thought and patience from everyone involved. Massive respect.

Downstairs, Monc Eyecare runs eye tests in a cork-clad room where the clinical equipment waits behind a softly lit curtain until it’s brought out to a vintage armchair. An avocado-green vintage sink sits there, too. Nobody looks forward to an eye test. This one might change that.

Nina sums it up: “Designing to nature’s timescales, rather than commercial ones, dictates qualities of longevity and circularity. This Monc store is also a material bank; matter preserved in a beautiful and useful state until it continues to cycle.”

A shop that doubles as a store of materials waiting for their next job. Every fit-out should be held to that standard.

Silo: A Zero-Waste Restaurant in London by Nina+Co.

This interior is a la-la land of moulded seaweed pendants, furniture made of unusable timber offcuts, and floors assembled from pure, natural cork (harvested by hand without harming the tree).

[Images courtesy of Nina+Co. Photography by Anna Batchelor.]