MYKITA Shop · Berlin, Germany

Name: MYKITA
Words: Alice Harrison

With an eye-catching all-white interior, the Mykita Shop — both an optician and glasses store — is a bastion of illumination and innovation in Berlin-Mitte.

The Mykita brand is famous for creating contemporary eyewear that combines handcraft with technology. With stores around the globe, the one on Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße in Berlin’s central Mitte district, one street from Alexanderplatz, is a physical manifestation of the brand’s holistic approach to design. The glasses sold at the store in Mitte are designed and manufactured just one suburb away. In Kreuzberg, you’ll find the Mykita Haus — the heart of the brand and their manufacturing hub. The entire production is in-house, ensuring quality and enabling interdisciplinary research. This all-encompassing approach is reflected in the Mykita stores.

Back in Mitte, in-house optometrists offer certified eye-tests and assist customers in choosing their perfect pair from the Mykita Wall, which holds over 350 frames. The ‘Mykita Mylon’ collection is a go-to choice — a collection derived from extensive research and development into the composition of material, construction and surface of the frames. The ‘Mykita Mylon’ collection is made from fine polyamide powder fused into solid objects using Selective Laser Sintering: 3D printing technology. Mykita explains, “Formed layer by layer according to a digital data set, the high-tech material allows for ultimate freedom in design. The collection illustrates this with shapes ranging from discrete to defiant.”

“Formed layer by layer according to a digital data set, the high-tech material allows for ultimate freedom in design.”

The unique architecture of the store, developed by Mykita itself, reflects the brand’s visionary use of materials and unconventional creative imagination. The concept of the store design centers around removing objects from their typical environment and placing them within a new context, repurposing out-of-service flight attendant trolleys as storage facilities and perforated steel shelving supports as the luminous Mykita Wall. The Mykita Shop in Mitte pushes boundaries in terms of materiality and technology, and as a result, experience, offering an ultimately sensorial and personal experience of purchasing iconic eyewear.