LDF10: The Applounge at Meza

Of all the things we took in on our London Design Festival explorations yesterday, The Applounge was perhaps the most inspirational – certainly in terms of pushing the boundaries of what we perceive to be a traditional retail space. Offering a well-curated selection of physical product – some rather lovely iPhone and iPad cases, watches and even the brilliant PostCardens that we’ve previously featured – alongside an equally well considered array of Apps, eBooks and MP3s, The Applounge also offers coffee and cocktails thanks to its location as a pop-up inside Soho’s famous Meza Restaurant, which, for you pop fans, stands on the site of the legendary Marquee Club…

A collaboration between Spotspot, Method and Digital Wellbeing Labs, The Applounge is a brave new concept, blurring the lines between a social and retail space but more so in it’s experiment to bring digital products into a physical environment – however, with hundreds of thousands of Apps available and countless “expert guides” on newsagent’s shelves, the need for a considered curation of this content is certainly on the rise. Offering visitors/consumers the ability to peruse this digital content are a selection of iPhones and iPads – encased in Spotspot’s innovative ‘BouncePad’ prototype – and with the pick of Apps, and accompanying physical accessories, arranged into 3 curated collections, there’s something to fit everyone’s individual tastes. Innovative, inspirational and experimental, The Applounge is everything that London Design Festival is about…