AMO & PAX: design - shop - wellness
Amo & Pax is new, but the thinking behind it is probably from a different era of shop. When the connections between makers and customers were direct and often local. Here we’re looking to create a different sort of retail experience, more holistic, one with purpose. One that reflects a more conscious form of designing and making, of selling and buying. And we want to nurture wellness and meaningful experiences.
We’re all having to change the way we live, work, think. And shop.
Amo & Pax has design, ethics and sustainability at its heart – in its bricks and mortar store and in what’s on offer for our customers, for our new community. Our shop’s carrier bags are reinvented cement bags, ink-stamped by us by hand. We believe all have a responsibility – and we are trying to be responsible. Testing and redesigning. Trying to find a different model of a shop.
We’re repairing clothes and upcycling on-site, with a fabulous tailor, using vintage fabrics and embroidered patches. It’s a chance for people to reclaim a lost piece, to put their own stamp (or patch, perhaps) of individuality on it. Why should favourite items not live on, uploved, reborn?
Reimagining and reinventing retail.
We are designing, handmaking and partnering artisan producers.
Nurturing relationships which are individual, interesting and playful. We are working with lots of Irish makers for our shop and online – trusted jewellers, potters, pattern makers, printers, graphic designers – as well as with knitwear companies, embroiderers and weavers elsewhere in Europe.
We are also making some clothes, small runs, individual designs. It’s where we have come from, but more focussed, less transient. Each garment is a signature of sorts, reflective of handmaking. There are handmade ceramics too, hand-dipped, fired just up the road from our store. We think they travel well.
Doing and making are acts of hope.
Our project is about much more than simply a shop.
We have an activities & events space, with classes and workshops around yoga, meditation and self development. The building expresses the spirit of the idea, marrying old and new. Offices that were stripped out, repurposed and reshaped. Reinvented. But upgraded and upspeced. Solar-powered. Thickly insulated and reglazed. Wheelchair accessible.
Its materiality matters too. Exposed plaster, wooden floors, rescued doors. A gently curved wall of reclaimed bricks encloses the exterior space. Salvaged gates were sourced for the entrance. It sits among the trees, at once modern, and yet with a timeless heart. Find us here.
Like William Morris, we believe in applying art to useful wares – creating something useful that is also joyful.
