R.M. Williams

R.M. Williams has been making boots since 1932, not products shaped by trend or season but objects built to last, to wear in, to carry the marks of a life used well. For nearly a century, the brand has held to a single belief: that quality is not a feature but a foundation.

When ACRD Design set about creating a new retail experience for the brand, the challenge was one of translation. How do you honour 91 years of Australian craft heritage without reducing it to nostalgia? How do you build a space that speaks to where the brand has come from, and where it is going? The response was a space assembled from Australian materials, each chosen for what it carried and not just how it looked.

The Sunbaker was specified across stores in Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne. Warm white in base, scattered with softly rounded marble, limestone and granite, it carries the hue of the Australian landscape in a way that is honest rather than decorative — present without announcement, grounded without effort.

In Perth, at 190 St Georges Terrace, the flagship occupies 218 square metres in one of the CBD's most considered addresses. A curved boot wall anchors the space, its form drawn from the heel of the boot itself, with handmade Victorian clay bricks from Krause lining the backdrop. Furniture hewn from Hydrowood, hand-crafted by Made By Morgen, sits with the kind of weight that only comes from things made properly. At the shopfront, a 15-metre transparent LED screen runs a film of Western Australian landscape, of Purnululu and Lucky Bay and country that shaped the brand long before there were stores to sell anything, and beneath all of it, the quiet presence of The Sunbaker underfoot.

Across each store, the R.M. Williams logo was waterjet cut from the terrazzo tiles themselves, filled with brass inlay and set into the floor. Stone shaped into mark, with the kind of material precision that speaks to a shared sensibility between two brands that have always understood materials as more than surface — chosen for what they are, not what they suggest.

The same material moved through Adelaide and Melbourne, each store with its own character, its own scale and light, The Sunbaker grounding them not as a repeated finish but as a consistent thread running quietly across different rooms and different cities.

Two Australian brands working from the same instinct: that what is built with care and intention outlasts the project itself, and that the material choices made at the beginning are still being felt long after everything else has changed.