Between Rävala and Estonia boulevards, in the very heart of Tallinn, a stretch of city long left closed off and out of step with its surroundings is being reimagined as Rävala Galerii — a mixed-use quarter of some 70,000 square metres, replacing the former Designers' House and the Meloni department store across four central plots. The brief itself set a high bar: buildings that would knit convincingly into the surrounding city fabric, with facades articulated enough to escape the flatness of an ordinary street wall. The developer's own framing was blunt about the stakes — to turn a neglected corner of the city centre into something varied, contemporary and genuinely pleasant, somewhere pedestrians would actually want to linger, not just pass through on their way elsewhere. KOKO's approach centred on fitting into the historic centre on its own terms — strong accessibility on foot and by transport, clearly legible massing broken into readable volumes, and, above all, a ground floor genuinely worth walking past rather than around. "KOKO's approach focused on integration with the city centre, strong accessibility by both transport and on foot, a clear articulation and legibility of the building volumes, and an attractive ground floor facing the street," as the brief was later summarised in the press. At the centre of the whole design sits a single organising idea, in the words of KOKO partner Andrus Kõresaar: a glass-roofed gallery street running straight through the block, physically stitching Rävala and Estonia boulevards back together for the first time.
That gallery street becomes the project's spine. Rather than treating the quarter as a set of separate buildings loosely arranged around a car park, KOKO threaded a genuine pedestrian route between the two boulevards, covered overhead in glass, lined with retail, dining and service space at ground level. Around it, landscaped public squares, an outdoor café and a fountain extend the gallery's logic out into the open air, turning what had been a closed, tired stretch of city into new shared ground — alongside Viru Keskus and the rebuilt Kaubamaja, forming, in the words of the project's lead developer, one continuous piece of public urban space for people to actually spend time in. Above the retail and gallery levels, the quarter carries offices, a hotel, and residential space, organised across a combined gross floor area of more than 67,000 square metres. On the uppermost floors, canopy-covered terraces open out toward Tammsaare Park and Rävala puiestee — generous outdoor space at a scale rarely offered this close to Tallinn's historic core, and a rare vantage point from which to take in the wider sweep of the boulevards below. Materially, the buildings lean toward permanence and restraint: limestone slabs, dark granite and brass carry the weight of a city-centre address, giving the new quarter a texture that reads as substantial rather than provisional, built to sit comfortably alongside its older neighbours rather than compete with them. It's a materials palette better suited to decades than to a single design trend — stone and metal that will weather and darken gracefully rather than date.
The jury's reaction, reported at the time, singled out the same qualities the brief had asked for: clearly marked entrances, and — above all — the sheer scale and clarity of the gallery and pedestrian zone running between the two boulevards, praised by the Architects' Union's own jury representative as genuinely striking and worthy of a central Tallinn address, with entrances "very well marked" and the gallery and pedestrian zone between the two boulevards singled out as especially memorable. Development is led by Brave Capital together with Go Group and Norber Grupp, with a new detailed plan the next formal step before construction could begin — a process that, given the project's scale, was expected to take considerable time even as the competition result was announced. Across the four plots combined, the wider brief called for somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 square metres above ground and a further 15,000 to 20,000 square metres below, split between the shopping, office, hotel and residential uses that make up the finished mix. For KOKO, Rävala Galerii represents an unusually large-scale test of an idea the practice returns to often at smaller scale elsewhere: that a building's real civic value often lies less in its silhouette than in the quality of the space it opens up at street level. Here, that idea is scaled up to the size of an entire city block — a single gallery street asked to do the work of reconnecting two boulevards, and two halves of the city centre, that had drifted apart. The ambition, as its developer put it at the time, was for Rävala Galerii to join Viru Keskus and the rebuilt Kaubamaja in forming one continuous piece of shared urban space — a stretch of central Tallinn genuinely worth walking through, not just past.
KOKO hasn't carried the scheme alone. From early on, the practice worked alongside Benoy, the London retail-planning specialists, whose international experience with large mixed-use centres helped shape the commercial logic behind KOKO's architecture. More recently, as the project has moved toward implementation, retail and leasing strategy work has continued under StudioN, led by Robert Bishop — a July 2024 feasibility study confirming the scheme's compliance with the approved detailed plan (60,099 square metres above ground, with a below-ground option of either 30,735 square metres across three levels or 20,000 square metres across two) and refining the functional mix toward roughly 40% retail and food and beverage, 35% offices, 15% hotel, and the remainder split between leisure and flexible "blue-sky" space. That later study frames Rävala Galerii's position frankly: Tallinn already carries an oversupply of retail, so the quarter has to earn its place against established neighbours like Solaris, Viru Keskus and the Stockmann department store, and against newer competition such as Porto Franco, Arter Quarter and the Rotermann Quarter — won not through sheer scale, but through a classic anchor-driven retail logic, large flagship units pulling footfall past smaller, higher-value shopfronts, with food and beverage anchoring the plan and spilling out onto the external plaza itself.