Better retail design

Typically sharp commentary on the state of retail design by the Journal-Sentinel's Whitney Gould in Sunday's paper:

Stand-alone store puts mall to shame
By Whitney Gould

On the coasts and in Europe, modern store design has become almost an art form.

In the malled-out Milwaukee area, alas, developers of all too many new retail spaces are marching backward, to judge from the kitschy, Disneyesque facades at Glendale's new Bayshore Town Center and many smaller shopping strips in the western suburbs. These wallpaper-thin ventures in fake history, repeated endlessly from one community to the next, erode a sense of place and give nostalgia a bad name.

A welcome departure from the trend is the Crate&Barrel store at Mayfair. This crisp showcase for Euro-sleek home accessories and furnishings, which opened in late 2005 in the mall parking lot, is so beautifully designed, inside and out, that it's a gentle rebuke to the bland, sprawling mall next door.

The two-story, stand-alone Crate&Barrel is a series of interlocking boxes clad in a tapestry of white precast , buff stone, glass and corrugated, galvanized metal. Horizontal windows wrap around the corners on both levels. The front and rear entrances are big and transparent; the back side, facing Mayfair Road, is especially welcoming, with a spacious patio, a sloping, handicapped-accessible walkway and generous landscaping.

The airy interior, with its polished concrete floors and warm finishes (maple, pine, cedar and buff limestone), is rationally laid out and easy to navigate. And there are some handsome details, including a big swoop of tawny maple that looks like extruded taffy and serves as both display and checkout counter.

The store is also admirably green, flooded with sun from the well-spaced windows and skylights. When I was out there on a recent balmy day, the entrances at either end were wide open, bringing in a nice breeze. A concrete canopy linking the store to the mall is planted with low-growing vegetation, to absorb runoff.

To move from Crate&Barrel to the mall is like entering a time machine. While suburbs themselves have begun to make gestures toward pedestrian-friendly design, Mayfair remains a creature of cookie-cutter, auto-dependent sprawl. Looking out over a vast parking lot, the mall's facade is mostly vast stretches of precast and brick, with appliquéd Old World detail: fussy gables, finials and corner towers. The back side is particularly bleak - essentially a big, unarticulated loading dock overlooking a sea of asphalt.

Inside, despite the addition in recent years of an atrium and second story that add daylight, it feels like malls everywhere: antiseptic and artificial, with canned air and canned music. If I were the czar of Mayfair, I'd peel away the entire facade, bring in some first-rate designers to create a glassy new front, and green up the surroundings. In other words, take a cue from that elegant upstart next door.

Curious to know more about how Crate&Barrel approached the design of its stores, I called up the CEO, Gordon Segal. The 68-year-old dynamo started the company with his wife, Carole, in 1962, on Chicago's Wells St. The stylish wares they had picked up in Europe were displayed on packing crates and barrels.

Based in Northbrook, Ill., the chain has grown to nearly 150 stores nationwide. Some, like the one on Broadway in Manhattan, are in gracious older buildings; others, like the one at Mayfair in Wauwatosa, are unabashedly contemporary. The newer ones have similar features - rigorous geometry, lots of glass - but no two are alike. They're all designed in-house by the firm's architecture department, with an eye toward what will last.

"We're very neurotic about good architecture and good design," Segal told me. "Beautiful things have a longer life than ugly things. And they make people feel better. Look at the iPod and the Apple computer. People want to have them because of the way those things look. Same thing with building a store. Why would you want to put up an ugly box?"

Segal said the company uses only renewable woods, and tries to stick to local materials, such as the Wisconsin limestone in the Mayfair store. "It's not fancy stuff, like what you'd find at Neiman Marcus," he said. "But we want to create a clean, inviting atmosphere - the kind of design that will be as beautiful 10 or 20 years from now as it is today."

Not a bad recipe for retailers of all stripes. If cleaner, greener design wins enough converts, the effect could be transformative for shoppers and communities alike.

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