What does the future hold for department stores? Reinvention, repurposing?

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What does the future hold for department stores? Reinvention, repurposing?

Sure, section stores as we've known them might not survive. But their future could be far more interesting. As one writer points out, empty retail units brand perfect spaces for art, theatre, workshops or even retirement homes.

When the first bang-up section stores opened in Paris and the US in the late 19th century, they were like zilch that had been seen. There were cafes, restaurants and smoking rooms, fountains and winter gardens, luxury appurtenances that customers could browse without being bothered past staff.

There were fifty-fifty ladies' lavatories: Women could spend an entire day in town in safe and without moral opprobrium. A glimpse of lifestyles that had previously been bachelor simply to the elite was at present on view to about anyone who strolled in.

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It'south difficult to reconcile all this with the dying section stores that at present loom, unloved, in cities, towns and suburban malls. A walk through central London takes you past the dead blob of Debenhams on Oxford Street and the before long-to-close former Army & Navy in Victoria. Edinburgh has lost Jenners.

It's perchance even worse in the United states: The ailing JC Penney has closed more than 160 stores, Neiman Marcus has been battling with bankruptcy and restructuring, and other once-mighty names are in problem. 1 estimate suggests that 800 US department stores may shut during the next five years – roughly half the remaining mall-based total.

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The pandemic retail apocalypse has been written well-nigh extensively, but what about the architectural losses? While Selfridges has recently been granted a licence to host weddings at its swaggering Edwardian Oxford Street headquarters, too as experimenting with pop-ups and opening a vegan butcher, Marks and Spencer is demolishing some of its landmark stores and replacing them with generic mixed-use buildings that accept piddling of the flair of the originals.

Gems such as the streamlined 1930s Debenhams in Taunton, south-west England, face uncertain futures. The trend appears to be to let these buildings become: Simply equally the retail world has moved on, these cavernous carcasses should be knocked downward or gutted to make room for something else.

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Is this the only option? Besides equally being architecturally meaning, these remarkable buildings are an incredible resource. They may be desolate now, only myriad fascinating futures are possible.

Take Paris's La Samaritaine, a m, 70,000 sq thousand complex of Art Nouveau and Fine art Deco buildings in the kickoff arrondissement, which opened in 1870 and grew to become one of the architectural wonders of its historic period.

Paris's La Samaritaine is a grand, 70,000 sq m circuitous of Art Nouveau and Fine art Deco buildings in the first arrondissement. (Photograph: AFP/Christophe Archambault)

Afterwards a lengthy and controversial redesign procedure, it finally reopened this twelvemonth, wrapped in rippling, translucent glass designed past the Japanese architects SANAA. A luxury hotel, a remodelled store and offices are part of the scheme; more surprisingly, perhaps, it besides includes 96 social housing units and a nursery – an impressive intervention in a sensitive celebrated site.

In that location are more than experimental possibilities, too. Kathryn Bishop of strategic consultancy The Future Laboratory points to projects where department stores accept been converted into retirement homes or sheltered adaptation.

After a lengthy and controversial redesign process, La Samaritaine finally reopened this year. (Photograph: AFP/Christophe Archambault)

The Folkestone senior-living community in Wayzata, Minnesota, is a former mall, its brick-faced blocks offering a simulacrum of urbanity. "Many Americans over 55 don't desire suburban bungalows but sidewalks and shops," she said. "Nosotros might see wellness and wellbeing much more integrated in the streets."

Some other possibility is culture. Might non empty retail units make perfect spaces for fine art, theatre, workshops? There are big windows for studios and display, and deep flooring plates for galleries. Museums are keen not to be perceived equally exclusive – what better mode to present their treasures to the public than on high streets? Or perhaps spaces in less residential areas could transform into nightclubs, which accept been shut downward past the pandemic. Later all, nightlife always appropriates spaces conceived for other uses.

(Photo: Unsplash/Dan Nelson; Art: Jasper Loh)

What went wrong with traditional department stores in western cities? It seems obvious to blame the huge growth in online shopping – accelerated by the pandemic – but Vicki Howard, an academic at the Academy of Essex and the writer of From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Shop, identifies a longer, sorrier history. This reaches back to the belatedly 20th century, when debt-driven expansion enabled major retail players to swallow up local brands, creating identikit stores that were shadows of their erstwhile selves.

"Businesses took every opportunity to strip abroad those costly amenities which had made them luxurious – the service, the preparation of the staff," she said. "So they expanded into the suburbs, where they built windowless boxes, maximising flooring and brandish infinite in the center of a machine park. The materials they used didn't stand up the test of fourth dimension and they ended upwards as strip malls."

This shift from city centres was faster in the US, merely it hasn't been entirely one-way, Howard adds: In the by decade, as downtowns have been gentrified and revitalised, abased malls have been redeveloped as well. The Mall of America in Minnesota, the state's biggest, filled upward some of its empty spaces with a large walk-in health clinic in 2019, a motility that looks prophetic in light of COVID-19.

If the thought of the department store itself is to endure, it is going to take to alter. For some, this might mean prioritising luxury. The success of London's Dover Street Market, created past Comme des Garcons founder Rei Kawakubo and her married man Adrian Joffe in Mayfair, has established a model for the section store every bit a high-concept, loftier-blueprint hang-out, closer to an art gallery than a store and mixing streetwear with haute couture.

The iconic hut in Dover Street Market Singapore. (Photograph: Club 21)

Dover Street Markets take now materialised in locations including Singapore, Tokyo, Beijing and LA. In New York, Roman & Williams' Lafayette Street outlet offers antiques, crafts, art, dining and design in an upmarket interior which has something of the crowded luxury of the grandest 19th-century stores.

London-based architecture practice Sybarite is building a number of audacious retail spaces in China, some repurposed from older structures. Sybarite's stores recall the ambition of the gilt era of Selfridges and the like – if non the aesthetic.

One projection for the high-stop store brand SKP-S brings sci-fi fantasy to fundamental Beijing: A "Mars zone" features life-size model space vehicles, adaptation modules and immersive evocations of the Martian mural; its snaking corridors expect like something from Star Wars.

Sybarite co-founder Torquil McIntosh explains that Chinese consumers, once derided for copying western fashions, are now leading the way in retail. "The Chinese take understood that people simply want to have fun, spend a day out and Instagram the hell out of everything," he said. "Customers switch betwixt their phones and the real environment and back every second."

London-based architecture practise Sybarite is building a number of adventurous retail spaces in China, including one projection for the loftier-end store brand SKP-S in Beijing. (Art: Sybarite)

For other projects, the fundamental volition exist location. Bishop identifies a phenomenon she refers to as "small box stores". If the past few decades were dominated past suburban malls filled with huge DIY outlets, home-furnishing outfits and discount hypermarkets, many of these businesses have been trying to get back into city centres – "fifty-fifty Ikea", Bishop pointed out.

The fact that and then many of us have been working from habitation during the pandemic has had a revitalising effect on local loftier streets, with workers popping out to shops and cafes near where they alive. Stores and big brands might accept to come up to us rather than expecting us to go to them.

Empty shops are usually seen equally an indicator of economic bane but, looked at another way, they are spaces of opportunity. It volition take subtle shifts in regulation and developers' mindsets – abroad from relying on financially leveraged global brands paying assured rents.

It will also accept engagement from local authorities and communities, committed to maintaining these distinctive and oftentimes historic structures on their streets. And it will demand a new, nimble entrepreneurialism. Certain, department stores as we've known them might not survive. Merely their time to come could be far more interesting.