From supermarkets to showrooms, the following examples show diverse retail design responses to key business challenges
Project: Orange 201, Westbourne Grove, London
Client: Orange
Designer: Section D
Year: 2005
This unbranded store makes a refreshing change. Although owned by the mobile phone provider Orange, there is no reference to them directly. The location and the store create the best opportunity to make the selecting and buying of a mobile phone a more artful, personal and tactile experience. The handmade feel of the store with its chilled out feel - a cross between a local gallery and a lounge - immediately demystifies the experience. And with knowledgeable, friendly staff and the opportunity to have a photograph of you taken on a mobile phone and featured on the gallery wall adds up to a warm experience, where you feel at home with the brand.
Project: Urban Outfitters, Oxford Street, London
Client: Urban Outfitters
Designer: Otto Design Group
Year: 2004
Urban Outfitters is one of those retailers which has had the ability to inspire and surprise consistently in many unique ways. As such it is continually held as one of the exceptions to the notion of predictable retailing. Its irreverent, chaotic, ad-hoc style lends only more interest and intrigue to its proposition. The idea of deconstruction and deference in Urban Outfitters' interior architecture says as much about the company as a brand.
Part of Urban Outfitters' success is in the controlled growth of the company. There isn't an Urban on every block, and it has demonstrated since its 1970s origins how you can consistently retain special appeal. The eclectic merchandise and the highly visual environments demonstrate how, through unpredictability, the stores remain a constant draw to the target consumer who has a hunger for the new and surprising.
Project: Selfridges, Bullring, Birmingham
Client: Selfridges
Designer: Future Systems
Year: 2003
This department store is an example of how the design of both the exterior and interior of a retail environment can have a dramatic impact – not only upon people’s perceptions of the store and its product offer, but people’s perceptions of an entire city centre.
Acting as the anchor to the Bullring development, the exterior of the store has created an iconic landmark for Birmingham - becoming as a symbol of innovation and spirit. The store itself sits confidently at one end of the mall.
Divided into four distinct levels each with its own personality, Selfridges takes the cutting edge to the high street to create a retail experience that neither intimidates nor excludes. While housing a collection of brands, Selfridges achieves a seamless transition whereby the sum is greater than the parts.
Project: Nissan Flagship showroom, Ginza, Tokyo
Client: Nissan
Designer: Akihito Furnita
Year: 2001
Nestling in the heart of the luxurious Ginza retail area of Tokyo, the Nissan Gallery epitomises a futuristic vision of modern car design. The showroom exterior is a welcome calm punctuation in the visually chaotic Tokyo street landscape. In its huge double-height glazed showroom, one car is elevated to hero status on a giant stainless steel turntable stage.
A sterile interior is beautifully detailed with complementing mixtures of stainless steel, glass and white illuminated corrugated plastics. The space is dramatic in layout whose most outstanding feature is a double height 'turbine like' stainless steel spiral staircase that leads to a computer filled observation suite overlooking the showroom. Nissan has created a sci-fi-esque brand showcase that exudes an advanced engineering aesthetic: this is where F1 meets 007.
Project: Paul Smith, Willoughby House store, Nottingham, UK
Client: Paul Smith
Designer: In-house
Year: 2004
Seldom does a brand have the opportunity to find the perfect building in the perfect location in the town that is the brand's spiritual home. Paul Smith's Nottingham flagship does all of these things.
Set in the centre of Nottingham, this 18th century, quintessentially English town house captures the essence of the Paul Smith brand, and it is interesting to see how effortlessly the house becomes a retail space without actually affecting the interior. The products are displayed with the minimum of hardware and one room flows into the next. A collection of slightly eccentric images, photographs and illustrations give prominence to the brand's lineage, while imperial measurements are painted on the leading edge of each tread of the staircase, resembling a tailor's tape measure, and further endorsing the brand's deep-rooted design and tailoring heritage.
Project: Topshop flagship store, Oxford Circus, London
Client: Arcadia Group
Designer: In-house
Year: 1999
Rather than being a shrine to the brand, Topshop's flagship store is a living, breathing celebration of it. The environment is alive and buzzing and changes almost daily. The windows constantly evolve and act as the voice of the brand by highlighting all that is close to its heart - from tributes to London Fashion Week to a display conveying Topshop's ethical stance on fake fur.
Within, the store is crammed with a diverse array of product, yet the navigation remains clear as each area has a very different look and feel - from the softness and femininity of the lingerie section to the youthful energy that surrounds the denim display. Visual merchandising is used to maximum effect, as mannequins punctuate each area, offering consumers a host of ideas and inspiration, and product is hung at high level, aiding navigation and injecting colour, texture and warmth to the eclectic mix.
The store also morphs into an event space, hosting charity events and fashion shows and providing Topshop with the most effective PR tool it could have imagined. Rather than growing tired over the years, this flagship store gathers pace and momentum daily.
Project: Camper, SoHo, New York, USA
Client: Camper
Designer: Marti Guixe
Year: 2000
Camper as a brand typifies the kind of ethical, wholesome organisation that a growing proportion of consumers are seeking to endorse. Its physical presence as a store confirms its stance as a company. No-nonsense product display side-steps the usual arguments about which way is best to present shoes: the 'all in a line' style of display is reminiscent of a market and is somehow friendly and approachable - the opposite of high fashion.
The New York store presents the product on a huge flat slab running the length of the shop. Steps at one end that recall the architecture of the urban realm and this is echoed in the oversize spun steel lights that hang overhead – out of scale and larger than life, just like the Big Apple itself. Details like these are key to the Camper brand: globally familiar, locally different.
Project: Cinch, Newburgh Street, London
Client: Levi’s
Designer: Checkland Kindleysides
Year: 2002
Cinch is an example of how just one clearly defined idea can solve all the complex demands of a design brief. Cinch is the London home of Levi’s premium product, which sells alongside other limited edition garments in a store targeting the young fashion devotees of the Carnaby Street area.
The concept for the store is simple. A steel tube wrapped in red painted cord winds along the shop front, through the fascia along the walls of the store. It represents a giant thread, echoing the red thread that is used for the selvage seam of Levi’s denims. The customer is drawn along it, pausing at the various product displays that hang from it.
The store is made up of small rooms on three levels with a staircase linking them towards the rear. Approaching the stairs, the thread becomes the handrail and plunges downwards drawing you further into the store. The thread is a singular design solution: it is the signature on the shop front, a dramatic merchandising system, the handrail on the stairs, and the navigation device to guide customers through the space. It links the disparate spaces together, making them feel part of one concept.
Project: 1 Fournier Street, London
Client: Timberland Boot Company
Designer: Checkland Kindleysides
Year: 2005
This store demonstrates how a brand can embrace the principles of a community-based approach to retail design, with a sound environmentally responsible conscience. To look at the store at first glance it is not immediately clear what the store sells, or which brand owns the space. This deliberate approach is part of the concept that TBC have adopted for their stores by taking locations that have a rich heritage of former use and giving back to the community a sense of continuity of use.
In this case the façade of the store is a reproduction of the original facia of the 1950s, bearing the name of David Keira, the former owner of the store when it was a banana warehouse. The designers have reused items found in the basement to make shop fittings: wherever possible all original finishes have been left in place and any additional construction has used reclaimed materials.
The cash desk area underpins the sense of community, being designed like a large kitchen table and covered in leather to reflect the boot making expertise. Additional fittings have been designed to play to the former use, with boots displayed on handmade metal racks that hang from the rafters like bunches of bananas.
Project: PARKnSHOP ‘freshmarket’ concept, Hong Kong
Client: ParknShop
Designer: Fitch, London
Year: 2000
This concept is a successful example of combining actual customer needs, based on research and cultural demands, with an internationally-minded design solution. Research highlighted issues with Hong Kong customers’ domestic spaces, as well as identifying their preference for fresh food, their daily shopping routines and an increased demand for ‘safe’ ingredients.
Hong Kong consumers have limited storage capacity for fresh food, due to the prohibitive cost of housing space, and as a consequence meals are often bought daily. Culturally, most food shopping is from the local ‘wet’ markets; the freshest and most abundant stockists of meat, live fish, vegetables and fruit. These markets are usually held in outdoor, municipal spaces. But the lack of hygiene controls was an increasing concern for PARKnSHOP’s target customers.
The ‘freshmarket’ concept replicates the positive attributes of a ‘wet’ market - noise, energy, activity and abundance – but within a controlled, trusted supermarket environment. Placed at the heart of the store, the market is surrounded by a perimeter walkway - the ‘power aisle’ - in which hard to resist. General merchandise bargains are located on the ends of gondola runs: these gondolas radiate outwards towards specialist focused departments, such as Health & Beauty, Rice, or Drinks, for example.
Within the ‘freshmarket’, extra attention is paid to traditional display techniques. Specially trained staff arrive hours before the store opens so they can create the visually appealing product displays. Their workstations are concealed within the merchandising furniture to allow them access to each display throughout the day.
The overwhelming impression is not only of a store with a true sense of theatre at its core, but with great relevance to its market.