Retail Concept Architect & Brand Curator
Thirty years of creating retail environments that function as cultural propositions. From founding BASE in Miami to the galleries of MoMA and The Frick, from Ian Schrager's landmark hotels to the global Delano brand under Ennismore — the work occupies the space where commerce becomes conversation.
Portrait by Matthew Morris. Used with gratitude.
Steven Giles is a UK-born creative professional whose practice spans retail concept architecture, brand curation, spatial and fixture design, buying, visual merchandising, fragrance design, and product development. He is, in his own words, a well-practiced hunter-gatherer — for whom the act of acquisition is inseparable from the act of discernment.
A former professional dancer and choreographer, he relocated to New York at the behest of Debbie Moore OBE and her iconic Pineapple Dance Studios, where he built what was celebrated at the time as the world's largest dance centre — home also to The Field, a nonprofit incubator for emerging choreographers that endured in the city for over thirty years.
He founded BASE in Miami in 1994 — a groundbreaking lifestyle store that achieved cult status before the category had a name. He has since named and built retail concepts for Ian Schrager (EDITION Hotels, TRADE, Morgans Hotel Group), BMW Mini, The Frick Collection, MoMA, Silversands Grenada, EDITION Waikiki, EDITION Sanya, and the Delano brand globally.
Current work includes serving as Retail Curator/Architect for the Delano brand under Ennismore — the world's fastest-growing lifestyle hospitality collective — developing the DELANO fragrance range Nothing Finer, writing a memoir about his mother titled The Unintended Mother, and developing Dance Makers — a prestige documentary series that does for contemporary dance what Chef's Table did for food. Stay tuned.
at PUBLIC Hotel
New York City
Ian Schrager's PUBLIC Hotel demanded a retail concept as conceptually rigorous as the building around it. The result was TRADE — named, designed, and built from scratch. The merchandise wall, the custom fixture system, the cash wrap, the object selection: every element conceived as part of a unified spatial argument. A gold bicycle positioned in front of a perfectly calibrated wall of objects. The point of view of a global traveller who collects things that mean something.
at The Miami EDITION
Miami Beach, Florida
The second named retail concept in a long creative relationship with Ian Schrager — for the EDITION brand in partnership with Marriott. Limited Edition occupies a curved, warmly lit space of brass, oak, and continuous LED-edged shelving. The white ceramic gorilla as centrepiece, Marshall headphones, Kaws figures, John Pawson books, a dinosaur, ceramic animals under glass domes. Extravagant and restrained at precisely the same time. The name is deadpan and entirely intentional.
BMW Mini Creative Campus
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
BMW Mini's creative incubator in Greenpoint — a space defined by the collision of design, mobility, and culture. Translucent colour discs suspended in the window, bikes elevated on lacquered red plinths, objects curated across the full spectrum from subcultural to refined. The KRINK display — graffiti supply tools arranged in a vitrine with the precision of fine jewellery — captures the essential tension: street credibility elevated to connoisseurship.
New York City
One of New York's most intimate and exacting cultural institutions. The red pedal car on the marble floor — wit deployed in an institution that takes itself very seriously. The neon Diptyque boxes and colour-saturated shelving against the blue-lit window wall is not what anyone expects of The Frick. That is entirely the point. Also developed: a perpetual retail fixture — a freestanding illuminated cube on industrial wheels with five-sided rotating cells, each manually turned to present different merchandise faces. Described by the architects as "too Gucci." The concept remains available.
