Waterstones
Store design | Furniture design
Our long-standing relationship with Waterstones began with the design of a successful award-winning project in Glasgow which was designed to head off the threat posed by the American bookstore, Barnes & Noble. From that successful starting point we worked closely with Waterstones on a number of exciting design projects around the UK - beginning with the creation of their new flagship store in Piccadilly, in the 1930s Grade I listed Simpson’s building.
In 2010, under the helmsmanship of Managing Director James Daunt, we were invited to develop a new vernacular for the store’s display furniture which would be rolled out across, and unify, the very mixed estate of the booksellers 300 bookshops (a legacy of its Dillons and Ottakar’s acquisitions over the years).
The furniture we developed in collaboration with Daunt was based on an Arts & Crafts style of black oak bookcase end-panels, plinths, and corniced headers, complimented by a range of new book tables which became 'centre-stage' display elements throughout the bookseller’s estate and which sat elegantly against new real wood floors. Cafe W coffee shops were also created at many of the branches, with Ercol seating at long dark-wood farmhouse tables in the Cafe in Waterstones Piccadilly. Daunt’s philosophy was to reintroduce ’old bookshop values’ for the bookstore, in order to offer tactile, enriching environments to its customers, and to give Waterstones a competitive edge over online booksellers like Amazon. Although including Kindle e-readers in store was initially considered a controversial one, Daunt also commissioned us to design shop-in-shop display furniture for displaying Kindle products so that they would sit harmoniously alongside the bookseller’s books.
The successful changes, together with the introduction of other promotional fixtures used by Daunt in his original bookshop on Marylebone Lane, were rolled out across Waterstones’ nationwide and have also been successfully applied by Daunt at Barnes & Noble stores across the USA in his role there as CEO.