Lacoste — Regent Street Flagship

Year: 2023  ·  Total area: 857m²  ·  Location: 182 Regent Street, London

This was an architect-specified microcement installation across the entire customer-facing fitout of Lacoste's Regent Street flagship — floors, walls, stairs and columns. The kind of project where every surface is in the public eye, every detail is examined, and there's no margin for the kind of failures you can paper over in a private apartment.

It's also the kind of project that doesn't get specified to just anyone. As the only Topcret installer in the UK at the time, our team was the only realistic delivery option for this material in London. But "specified" still doesn't equal "won" — every flagship comes with budget pressure, a tight construction programme, and a main contractor who needs convincing the microcement scope can be hit on schedule. We ran the pricing, the schedule, the build-up consultation, and the post-completion protection plan. All four had to land cleanly before the project went ahead.

The build-up: pre-empting cracks before they happened

For a retail flagship of this scale, the substrate-and-buildup conversation is the entire game. Cracks don't just look bad — they break the seamless impression that microcement is being specified for in the first place.

The architect's spec called for a 2–3mm cementitious and polymeric system with a Smooth Matt finish in Acero (a contemporary mid-grey tone), applied across:

• Floors — 580m² (the main retail surface visitors see when they enter)
• Walls — 137m² (display areas and structural surfaces)
• Stairs — 104m² (the connection to upper retail levels)
• Columns — 37m² (the freestanding architectural elements)

The build-up specification:

• Bonding primer matched to substrate condition
• Fibreglass reinforcement layer (standard at this product spec)
• Two layers of microcement base
• One to two layers of pigmented colour coats
• A polymer armour layer (CRED) for high-traffic mechanical resistance
• Sealant and wax finish
• Final surface hardness rating: 120N/mm²

Above all, the build-up was designed for a retail environment — high footfall, point loads from display fittings, daily cleaning, and the kind of long-term durability that lets a flagship store run a decade between refits.

On arrival: the cracks

When we got on site, the substrate had real problems. Cracks throughout the slab — the kind that, untreated, would telegraph straight through the microcement above and visibly vein the entire finished surface. This isn't unusual on busy commercial sites where the substrate has been through main-contractor traffic and trades movement during the fit-out programme. It does, however, force a remediation call.

We treated the cracks aggressively before the microcement system went down:

• Epoxy self-levellers for crack-bridging and structural integrity restoration
• Staples mechanically anchoring across the worst movement areas
• Additional reinforcement mesh layered specifically over the problem zones

This is the use case where mesh is doing real work — not as a routine throughout-the-job layer, but as targeted crack-bridging in remediation. Without it, the finished microcement would have shown veining within months of the store opening.

Site supervision and post-completion protection

A flagship project lives or dies by site supervision. We held detailed input into the build-up programme with the main contractor — making sure they understood the order of operations, the curing windows, and which trades had to be off our work areas at which moments.

After our work was complete, we agreed and specified the protection regime needed during the remaining fit-out — covering, traffic restrictions, and what other trades could and couldn't do over the new microcement surface. Without that, our finished floors would have been damaged inside a week by other trades' tool drops, paint splashes, and movement of fixtures.

This is the part of the job that doesn't show up in photographs but determines whether the architect ever gets to see the finished result without snags. Site supervision is the difference between specifying microcement and delivering it.

The result, and what came after

The job completed cleanly through and through. Acero across all four surface types, Smooth Matt finish, a uniform reading from one end of the store to the other.

The proof of how well the project landed: Lacoste went on to specify Topcret again for their New York flagship off the back of the Regent Street outcome. That kind of repeat business at flagship scale is the strongest endorsement a microcement system can earn — a global brand with no shortage of contractor options choosing the same material and the same partnership for the next prestige project.

Project specification

This project was completed during my time leading UK accounts at Topcret, before founding Dusk & Dune. The substrate-management and site-supervision approach used here is the same one I bring to every Dusk & Dune project today, scaled appropriately to residential and commercial work across the UAE and GCC.