Contemporary Retail Design

A Store Planner's Handbook

Eddie Miles

• Editore: The Crowood Press
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781785008719
• Argomento: Architecture
• Categoria: Interior Design

The world of retail design operates with a dynamism not often encountered in other commercial sectors. To successfully deliver a retail project, the store planner must possess a good working knowledge of a wide range of disciplines. As well as design, these include matters as diverse as store operations to materials and construction methods. Contemporary Retail Design: A Store Planner's Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the store planning process and is an essential companion for anyone embarking on a retail design project. Written from the perspective of the designer, it contains practical guidance on every step of the design and construction process including: an introduction to store types and their history; what to consider when planning a store; the practicalities of layout versus the psychological response of the shopper; the range of materials and finishes available and how to use them successfully; what to consider when planning for building services, security and store operations. The book's practical advice is supplemented with case studies showing examples of best practice, and is illustrated with 200 drawings and photographs from a wide variety of stores around the world.

Chapter One

Store Types and Their History

ORIGIN OF THE STORE

Market Trading

The typical high street store can trace its lineage back to the markets of the Middle Ages. The market served as a meeting place to allow producers of goods, primarily foodstuffs, to barter or sell their products. Equally, the market was where imported goods were sold by merchants who had played no part in their actual production. As trading practices were codified and regulated, so the rights of towns to hold markets were controlled through charters which sought to control which goods could be sold and by whom. By the thirteenth century, the market square was established and remains a feature today in many European towns and cities. The relationship between market buyer and market seller seems to have been an unequal one. Without the systems of distribution we know today, the effects of scarcity and local shortages would have been acutely felt by buyers and much of the control over market trade was intended to protect the consumer from sharp practice. As well as the open-air marketplace, the stalls could be organized to trade from a market hall under the control of the municipality who oversaw trading practices, rules and regulations such as the control of weights and measures. As the markets developed, so did the traders’ temporary stalls which were designed to display and to protect merchandise. These stalls became semi-permanent and by the fourteenth century examples of permanent structures are found, some of two storeys with the owners’ living quarters on the floor above.

Eighteenth-century storefront with characteristic bow-fronted oriel windows in London’s Haymarket.

John Stow’s Survey of London, published in 1598, describes this development in his recollection of how Old Fish Street in the City of London had developed in his time:

… these houses, now possessed by fishmongers, were at the first but moveable boards (or stalls), set out on market-days, to show their fish there to be sold; but procuring license to set up sheds, they grew to shops, and by little and little to tall houses, of three or four stories in height, and now are called Fish street.

By the early part of the seventeenth century, a new consumer society was emerging in London. By the mid 1600s, London’s population stood at over half a million, a five-fold increase over a hundred years. The growth in population also concentrated the wealthy in a single city which began to draw in products and consumer goods from the provinces and further afield. London thus became the focus of politics, culture and consumerism, populated and visited by gentry and nobility with the means to spend ostentatiously. Contemporary records, such as the diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, give today’s reader a fascinating insight into the retail world of the mid 1600s. Here, for instance, is John Evelyn’s account of his visit to Paris on 3 February 1664: ‘Here is a shop called NOAH’S ARK, where are sold all curiosities, natural or artificial, Indian or European, for luxury or use, as cabinets, shells, ivory, porcelain, dried fishes, insects, birds, pictures, and a thousand exotic extravagances.’

Evelyn’s contemporary Samuel Pepys includes in his diary (1660–69) frequent references to the London shops he visits. These include a glove and ribbon shop, drapers, goldsmiths, bookshops, victuallers, a cane shop, a periwig shop and a watchmaker. Clearly, by the Restoration, the major European cities could boast an array of shops selling a wide variety of luxury goods to wealthy consumers.

On 22 September 1666, and in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London of that year, we find Pepys bemoaning the lack of availability of glaziers: ‘My glazier, indeed, is so full of worke that I cannot get him to come to perfect my house’. The window glass of this time was not the flat, clear material we know today, but rather an imperfect, greenish-tinted sheet that was made from blown glass, cut into a cylinder and then re-heated and flattened. This glass, known as broad window glass, produced only limited-sized glass sheets. Another technique was that of crown glass manufacture, where a bubble of molten glass was spun to form a circular sheet, leaving a ‘crown’ of thicker glass in the middle. In the 1660s in France, Lucas De Néhou improved the size of glass sheets through the rolling of glass on an iron table and this technique was perfected over the next century so that by 1800, glass production in Europe was industrialized, making larger, more consistent glass sheets cheaper and more widely available. The size and quality of glass in the eighteenth century no doubt influenced the storefront which typically comprised bow-fronted oriel windows on either side of the main entrance door. The bow windows were typically the only source of natural light, with the lighting supplemented with oil lamps. This no doubt limited the depth of the store, with the rear portion being given over to a ‘back shop’, divided from the ‘fore shop’ by a decorative screen. As of now, retailers occasionally went to great expense to fit out their stores, as we learn from contemporary accounts.

Daniel Defoe’s 1726 work The Complete English Tradesman was intended, in the author’s words, as ‘a collection of useful instructions for a young tradesman’ and he defined tradesmen as ‘all other shopkeepers, who do not actually work upon, make, or manufacture, the goods they sell’. Defoe offers us a fascinating insight into the business of setting up a store in London in the eighteenth century, starting by selecting the right location:

For a tradesman to open his shop in a place unresorted to, or in a place where his trade is not agreeable, and where it is not expected, it is no wonder if he has no trade. What retail trade would a milliner have among the fishmongers’ shops on Fishstreet-hill, or a toyman about Queen-hithe?

Whilst acknowledging that an attractive store attracts new customer, Defoe warns those establishing a new retail store of excessive expenditure when coming to fit out their premises. He describes the retail interior of his day as painted and gilded, with decorative wall tiles and fitted out with fine shelves, glass-fronted display cases, mirrors, wall sconces and lanterns. From his account we understand the interior to be of high quality, in the classical style and well adorned with displays to show merchandise to best advantage. This certainly appears to have been common for high-end retail in the eighteenth century; little evidence exists to confirm how far down the market such techniques were used. I shall leave the final word to Defoe, who expresses his contempt for those spending extravagantly on shop fit-out: ‘So that, in short, here was a trade which might be carried on for about £30 or £40 stock, required £300 expenses to fit up the shop, and make a show to invite customers.’

Stores or Shops?

Like any commercial sector or specialist interest group, the retail business has its own lexicon, and this can lead to confusion and misunderstanding. Most shoppers in the UK would no doubt describe their destination on a shopping trip as a ‘shop’. Amongst those who take a professional interest in retail, these shoppers are headed for a ‘store’. The use of the word ‘store’ to describe the selling space (both physical and online) has its origins in the US, but it is now so widely used across the industry as to render the noun ‘shop’ redundant. This book will therefore follow the convention of using the word ‘store’ and its derivatives: store design, store planning and so on.

The word ‘shop’ exists as a verb, as in ‘it’s fun to shop at a new store’. Further possible confusion can arise if we consider the word ‘store’ in its original meaning, meaning a place where things are stored. In the retail world, the storeroom is designated the ‘stockroom’.

Emergence of the Modern Store

By the nineteenth century, retail was booming, with many more stores opening and existing stores embracing changes in fashion. Charles Dickens, writing in the 1830s, observed this modernization of the store in one of his Sketches by Boz:

Quiet, dusty old shops in different parts of town, were pulled down; spacious premises with stuccoed fronts and gold letters, were erected instead; floors were covered with Turkey carpets; roofs supported by massive pillars; doors knocked into windows; a dozen squares of glass into one; one shopman into a dozen …

Asprey’s late nineteenth-century cast iron and plate glass storefront in London’s New Bond Street.

The Glass Excise Act was abolished in 1845, ending a century of a tax originally introduced to raise money to fund Britain’s wars in the American colonies. The affordability of glass, both through the easing of taxation and the industrialization of its manufacture, allowed engineers and architects to create new forms not hitherto seen: the best-known example of this was Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, created for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Paxton’s structures relied on a framework of precast iron elements. Likewise, cast and wrought iron was indeed making its mark on the design of industrial and retail buildings, allowing for greater spans between walls and more open storefronts. Thus, by the mid-1800s we see the emergence of retail spaces that are even more recognizable as the stores we know in our own age. Other technologies that contributed to this were the widespread adoption of gas lighting in the 1820s and electric lighting from the end of the same century. By way of illustration as to how fast the modern retail store developed from this point, it was in 1909 that Harry Gordon Selfridge opened the first phase of what was to become Selfridges on London’s Oxford Street. His department store was purpose-built and fitted with electric lighting, lifts, a sprinkler system and large glazed display windows and entrance doors.

The early part of the twentieth century saw a growing middle class with the means to spend a greater part of their income on consumer goods and services than ever before. This led to an increase in the number of stores, and to their concentration in our high streets. With greater choice available to the consumer, Edwardian-era customer service became a vital part of retailing, reflected in Selfridge’s maxim ‘The customer is always right’. The early 1900s also saw the advent of the nationwide chain store, with the founding of Nordstrom, Walgreens, J.C. Penney, Neiman Marcus and Woolworth’s in the US. In Germany, the two department store groups Peek & Cloppenburg and KaDeWe were founded; the UK saw the start of Burton’s, Dorothy Perkins and Waitrose. It could be argued that retailers’ desire to have a presence in every major town or city in their home country, and in the latter decades of the twentieth century to establish a global presence, has resulted in a bland uniformity in our shopping experience. The counter-position is that the consumer now enjoys access to a global market, undreamt of in earlier eras. The establishment of nationwide and global retail brands has demanded not only a consistency of merchandise, service and price but also a standard of retail design to be applied across a brand’s estate. Store design must not only function as a space to display and sell but equally must explain the brand, tell the story of the brand and promote the values of the brand.

STORE TYPES

Before we start to dissect the store and explore store design, it is worth taking a brief survey of the distinct types of retail space that exist.

Diagrammatic mapping of retail types and locations.

High Street Stores

As we have seen, the high street store evolved as cities grew from medieval times and their basic form remains surprisingly unchanged over the centuries; that is to say, ground-floor retail space with residential or commercial use above. Occasionally, the retail areas extend to upper floors or to basements, and larger stores can be formed through the amalgamation of adjacent properties. The store’s façade is generally a single aspect with the storefront purposed to address a number of requirements, including the display of merchandise and the advertising of the store’s name and nature of business as well as ensuring that the store can be secured overnight. The storefront of the high street store therefore has a lot to do and we will explore all of these requirements in future chapters. For reasons of economy, commercialism and engineering, the high street store has tended to take the form of a long rectangle with a back of house space to the rear, with limited availability of natural light, other than from the storefront.

Malls and Shopping Centres

The shopping mall as we understand it today was first developed in the US in the 1940s, although the origins of a large building containing many individual retail units can be traced much further back to the markets of the Romans and the covered bazaars of fifteenth-century Istanbul, the latter still trading today. The first mall in the modern sense, a single building with internal retail units and offering a variety of other functions, is the Lake View Store at Morgan Park in Duluth, Minnesota. This building opened in July 1916 and was designed by Chicago architects Dean & Dean. Whilst modest by today’s standards, it was cutting edge in its day with the Duluth News Tribune reporting at the time that ‘Every business concern in Morgan Park will be housed in a commodious building about 200 ft long and 100 ft wide’. When it opened it accommodated a wide variety of retail offers, including a department store, a furniture store, a grocer, a butcher and a clothing shop. As a precursor to the malls of today, Lake View Store also offered services and entertainment, and visitors could take advantage of a barber, a dentist, a pharmacy and a bank as well as a billiard hall and an auditorium. In addition, the basement contained an ice-making plant that supplied the Morgan Park area. When constructed, these various businesses were located over three floors, with access from the building’s interior, although some businesses could also be located from the exterior, presumably those on the ground floor. Lake View Store still stands today, although the building is now much altered. The upper floor has been converted to apartments and the remaining retail is now only accessible from the front of the building, so that the original form of the building as a prototype mall is now lost.

The development of the shopping mall as an out-of-town centre, disconnected from the existing urban infrastructure and reliant on shoppers arriving by car, is also seen in Minnesota at the Southdale Center at Edina on ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Store Types and Their History
• Chapter Two: Store Planning
• Chapter Three: Shaping the Interior
• Chapter Four: Materials and Finishes
• Chapter Five: Storefronts
• Chapter Six: Display and Fixturing
• Chapter Seven: Building Services and Lighting
• Chapter Eight: Store Operations
• Chapter Nine: Delivering the Project
• Chapter Ten: Retail’s Future
• Glossary
• References and Further Reading
• Acknowledgements
• Index