Selfridges & Co

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LONDON P2 MANCHESTER P16 It has been a privilege to work with highly regarded retail visionaries such as Doug Tompkins, with whom Gerard Taylor worked when he was with Sottsass Associati in Milan in the ‘80s. Tompkins and his team had built the global Esprit retail chain and were known for working with the best designers of the time, including Joe D’Urso in California, Shiro Kuramata in Japan and Hong Kong, and Antonio Citterio and Ettore Sottsass in Milan.

During his time in Milan, Gerard worked with Esprit, designing the brand’s showroom spaces across Germany. He continued his work with them on his return to London creating retail stores across Australia and New Zealand through his own studio, in collaboration with Sottsass Associati.

The projects we created for Selfridges followed on from these global projects for Esprit, and from the design of numerous retail stores for British homewares brand Habitat.

LONDON Like Doug Tompkins, Vittorio Radice is a visionary retailer, driven to always reimagine retail spaces afresh.

This was very much the case when he left Habitat to revitalise the iconic but, at that time, staid Selfridges department store in London’s Oxford Street.

Radice once again assembled a team of highly accomplished retail executives around him, many of whom moved with him from Habitat. This was the case with Sue West, his Head of Retail, and the first Selfridges project we worked on together was for a new department store in Manchester’s Trafford Park, for which we designed the Food Hall and Homeware Department (the latter in association with our great friend Aldo Cibic in Milan). We subsequently designed the 20,000m2 Sports Hall in Selfridges Oxford Street.

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LONDON

The Oxford Street Sports Hall was an ambitious project, led by Vittorio Radice.

Radice decided to shake up the Selfridges status quo by enticing specialist retailers such as Cycle Surgery, Ocean Leisure and Wigmore Sports to open new generation concessions within the store. This was an entirely new idea for the retailers and for Selfridges, and bringing the project to fruition involved us working closely with the company’s retail buyers.

Products in the expansive hall ranged from sportswear and gym equipment to mountaineering and cycling, and seemingly covered every sport in between.

The design programme (evolved in close conjunction with Selfridges’ buyers) determined the retail flow by deciding which concession went where, and next to whom. Everything within the spaces was custom designed, with standard shopfitting elements integrated into each piece of bespoke furniture and architecture created by the studio.

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LONDON

In order to enjoy the sheer diversity of the product offer we designed each concession with a unique and intense personality such as the Cycle Surgery concession where the bikes and accessories were presented as if part of a mobile building which sat in front of a cycle assembly workshop behind.

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LONDON

Where products were visually dull, our aim was to enliven them by displaying them in creative ways. In the case of large mountaineering rucksacks, we did this by supporting them off translucent curved display walls to catch the eye and fire the imagination. In the tennis racket concession, meanwhile, we created a curved translucent orange wall to convey the energy involved in using a racket.

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LONDON

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MANCHESTER Selfridges was an anchor tenant in Manchester’s new Trafford Park shopping centre, and we were one of the principal design practices involved in creating the store. The first part of the project was the expansive Food Hall, which followed the precedent for the magnificent Food Halls in Selfridges and Harrods in London. We orientated the space around three central islands, devoted, in turn, to meat, cheese and a mixed delicatessen. On each island, produce was displayed in refrigerated counters and a bar-height counter service was provided for around 10 seated customers.

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MANCHESTER

The retail culture of the Food Hall was not meant to compete with supermarkets, but instead positioned it as a destination for more refined, specialist and, perhaps, indulgent food, drink and delicacies. The crux of the design was the creation of three produce islands and their central position – a decision established at the very outset of the design programme. We wanted to evoke the look and vibe of the long-established, family-run Italian delicatessens that are to be found in major cities across the UK, so worked closely with specialist refrigerated counter manufacturers to enliven their designs.

This created the perfect balance of sensory and visual playfulness, and produce authority.

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MANCHESTER

The Food Hall and Homeware Department took up most of one floor of the department store, with a Menswear Department by a complementary design studio positioned at the south wing. The centrally positioned circulation atrium carried the stairs to the lower ground floor.

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MANCHESTER

With a retail space that was as large as a department store, getting the right balance between promoting easy and fast circulation and enticing customers to stop and peruse the products was key. The personality, pace and rhythm of both the architecture and the shopfitting furniture had a huge part to play, but the rigour, discipline and creative flare of the visual merchandisers was the key to success.

Visual merchandisers can make or break a retail space: they have the potential to make it vibrant and standout, or dull and commonplace. Working with fine retailers such as Selfridges retail teams only served to make our design projects all the more successful.

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MANCHESTER

An important part of the architectural project was to create a subtle means of signalling the different values within each department. This example shows the curved ceiling rafts signifying the food space, clearly differentiating it from the homeware department, with its large-scale flat ceiling rafts.

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All retail projects (particularly larger scale ones, such as department stores), live or die on the quality of their retail buyers and visual merchandisers. With both the Selfridges and the Habitat projects, we had the privilege of collaborating with the very best, under the stewardship of their creative and visionary CEOs.

GERARD TAYLOR / Design Studio 1 Butler House, First Floor, 51 Curtain Road, London, EC2A 3PT T. 020 7739 8208 e-mail. gerry@gerardtaylor.com skype. gerardtaylor.com www.gerardtaylor.com