Under-an-arch-eco-excellence: Cabinet Store

“We’re trying to decelerate in a hyper-nervous world and identify the beauty in small things.” This sentence forms part of the mission statement of the Cabinet Store in Zurich, Switzerland, a concept boutique “for sustainable and luxurious clothing and the important things in life”. The language gives the game away: These retailers have evidently devoted a lot of thought to their concept. The founding couple, Nina and Jeroen van Rooijen, both trained in fashion design and have been active in the sector for quite a while now. Jeroen in particular is sought out by many for interviews – after all, he spent decades working as a style journalist for the daily “Neue Züricher Zeitung”, among others. In 2015, the couple took the plunge and went into retailing, first with a pop-up in the then brand-new lifestyle and shopping mile formed by the Wipkinger and Letten Viaduct, a railway highline that had been converted into a row of studios, stores, and restaurants. Jeroen van Rooijen recollects that “actually we just wanted to have fun for two months selling our things and then suddenly it had turned into eight years.”