Hoffritz for Cutlery store - New York 1939 - Morris Lapidus, Architect

Morris Lapidus, an architect known for the flamboyant style of his 1950s Miami Beach hotel designs such as the Eden Roc and Fontainebleau, was also a first-rate, innovative store designer. In his 1996 autobiography, Too Much is Never Enough, he describes his early successes in the 1930’s in the field of retail store design. He was a pioneer of store design who developed many of the modern concepts, which today are taken for granted. He opened up storefronts to expose the merchandise and the entire store at once. He used bright colors and intriguing lighting to attract customers. For his stores and hotels, he developed a palette of amorphous shapes used in ceiling treatments, ornament, furniture and plans called chevrons, beanpoles, woggles and cheese holes. In time, his use of these shapes and his compelling color selections congealed into a gestalt that formalized as a Jetsons-like archetypical  design aesthetic that may have never really existed as a style, but which today is instantly recognizable. Stores like Starbucks, Panera, and the new McDonalds prototype have adopted many of his playful and entertaining design concepts.

The Lapidus store designs of the 1930’s and 40’s were groundbreaking in their expansive use of glass, focused lighting, intriguing plans, innovative signing, theatrical impact and timelessness. He was a fearless designer, who was regularly mocked by his more “sophisticated”  colleagues  as a “schlock meister”, but nevertheless continues to have a significant impact on the world of commercial design.

Designing retail stores offers many career benefits not found in other types of projects. These benefits might help jump-start a young designer’s career or could prove to be so enjoyable as to become the core of a continuing retail design practice. Either way the major advantages of designing retail stores over other project types are as follows:

• Speed

Retail stores are always fast track projects. It is not unusual, for a modest-sized store, to have a timetable of 16 –24 weeks from the signing of the owner design agreement to the grand opening. These compressed design/construction timetables guarantee that the designer will never become bored with a project. In fact, they create their own excitement. They move so quickly that their actual construction, in a way, takes the place of the presentation and modeling modes in the design of other building types. The fruits of design labor are very quickly visible. This compressed time-frame is fitting for the age we live, and makes stores a good project type for younger designers who are accustomed to moving in a quick-paced digital world, and who might find the slower pace of other types of projects difficult. The speed of store projects is fun and rewarding.

• Budget

Some store designs, namely boutiques, offer the opportunity to build to per square foot budgets not found in other building types. It is not unusual for small stores to include high-end cabinetry, materials, details and lighting otherwise found only in the design of corporate conference rooms, luxury residential kitchens and baths, and high-tech facilities. Designers love to spend other people’s money (wisely of course), and the design of boutique stores often provides this opportunity. There is no room for waste in today’s downsized and efficient stores. This requires the designer be a crafty craftsman.

• Technology

Store design often incorporates state-of-the-art technology. Sometimes this provides the retailer an edge over its competition; sometimes the technology provides new ways to display merchandise, complete transactions, or tell the product story…think of all the special glazing details which have been developed for storefronts; the computerized electronics to process sales transactions; state of the art lighting techniques (LED, fiber optics, projector lighting); the early use of multiple screen and flat screen technology; the mechanical introduction of mind-altering smells to induce shopper purchases; and the use of music, sounds, and colors  to induce other desired patterns of shopper behavior. The careful use of lighting and materials to create “green” stores that must function well and meet or better their retail competitors is another challenge that designers will welcome.

• Fun

Store designers can have as much fun as movie-set designers by creating an imaginary world, which would not have existed, but for the designer. Their designs can break through conventions because the building type may have to meet the latest design trends. Store designs often have a short life compared to other building types like institutions, corporate offices, and churches, which permits the store designs “to live on the edge”. Dealing in this bold, highly competitive, fast-paced, world is fun. In addition to the store design, identification signs have become an art form in their own right and a technological stretch. All in all: more fun for the designer.

These are the reasons why many choose to become store designers. Do these benefits encourage you to explore this area of design?