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Best Products Company Store (former)

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former
1978, James Wines and SITE. Quioccasin Rd. (across from Blue Jay Ln.)

Sydney and Frances Lewis founded Best Products in 1957. Their love for modern art and architecture overlapped with their vision of a corporate image. They commissioned James Wines and his firm, SITE, of New York City, to design a series of showrooms. Wines, trained as a sculptor, characterized his work as “de-architecture.” The Quioccasin store was built to reflect the heavily wooded surroundings. A sliver of space planted with trees splits away the plain glass facade from the bulk of the showroom. Exotic landscaping in the parking lot and an unexpected green lobby prefaced a typical 1970s store interior. Best Products closed operations in 1997. In an unusual instance of adaptive reuse, the building was acquired by a Presbyterian church.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Richard Guy Wilson et al.
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Data

What's Nearby

Blackburn
Cheswick
Paradise and Tuckahoe School
Skipwith Academy (Bekeby)
Mooreland Landing

Citation

Richard Guy Wilson et al., "Best Products Company Store (former)", [Richmond, Virginia], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/VA-01-RI373.

Print Source

Buildings of Virginia: Tidewater and Piedmont, Richard Guy Wilson and contributors. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, 293-294.

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