Which were the most outstanding new stores of 2024? We asked store design expert, John Ryan, Managing Director, Newstores, for his selection.  

Are there times when you feel you should have got out and seen more stores during the year? It may not be recreation, but it is informative and in terms of helping you do your job better, it’s probably more effective than many other things you might find yourself doing during the course of a retail day. 

What follows is an entirely personal view of the best new stores that have surfaced during the course of 2024. Some are new endeavours while others are refurbishments that have seen a complete makeover of a store, sometimes emerging from a chrysalis bigger than what went before, while others have involved making more of an existing space. Whatever the case, these are all stores that have something about them that sets them apart and from which, mostly, broad lessons can be learned.  

 

Zara, Rossio Square, Lisbon 

‘Nobody remembers who came second’ is a maxim bandied around at major athletics events, yet as the Zara store in Lisbon’s central Rossio Square amply shows, there is merit in being a runner-up. This is in fact the world’s second biggest Zara and at 5,000 sq m and with four trading floors it is vast, with only the flagship in Madrid being bigger. 

Big also happens to be beautiful in this instance with the retailer’s store design team having worked hard at making the most of a historic building.  

The outcome is a fashion emporium that has a mild sense of the palatial about it with grand staircases leading to carved and moulded arches that usher shoppers along a corridor that takes them from one room to another.  

This is an entirely modern enterprise, however, with robotised pick and return kiosks, self-checkouts and large format screens, all of which have been fitted into what might seem an unlikely setting. Oh yes, and there’s a café offering, among other things, coffee and Portuguese custard tarts, lending a local flavour to the whole.   

  

 

Bac 117, Rue du Bac, Paris 

If you look closely before entering Bac 117, you may notice the supplementary words, Zara Home, but they are easy to miss as this is, first and foremost, Bac 117. No apology needs to be made for including both parts of the Zara brand in this article as what has been done here is very different from a standard Zara Home.  

The store takes the place of The Conran Shop, which closed at the end of last year and while it looks just as chichi within as its predecessor, prices are very much more accessible. 

Perhaps rather more to the point in this select part of Paris’ Rive Gauche, is the fact that while this is a store selling homewares and furniture, this is mingled with fashion, displayed as part of the store’s several roomsets and meaning a more lifestyled approach to both parts of the Zara offer.  

This is in fact a pop-up and is being trialled for a 12-month period. But you’d probably not identify it as such and landlords and rental agreements permitting, it seems very likely that this one will become permanent.  

   

 

Whole Foods Market Daily Shop, Upper East Side, New York  

Being appropriate to a specific neighbourhood is rarely straightforward when comes to convenience retailing and more so if a store is part of a much larger chain, 

The Whole Foods Market Daily Shop is, at 845 sq m, considerably larger than most local convenience stores, yet it is much smaller than its full-line sisters in Manhattan.  

Located on the posh Upper East Side, this is a store that seeks to meld the essence of a New York deli with a focus on organic product and some of the tech that has been test-driven in Amazon Fresh stores (Amazon owns the Austin-based chain), from self-checkouts to payment by palm.  

Small enough to be local, big enough not to need to be too heavily ‘curated’, the claim made by many retailers trying to fit their assortments into more diminutive spaces.    

   

 

H&M Westfield Stratford City, London 

The Swedish fashion giant has selected the East London megamall as the location for a store that is a world away from the relatively heavily merchandised norm of many of it stores.  

In place of this, it has ‘reimagined’ an existing store, turning it into the kind of thing that those familiar with better-end designer retailing will recognise. Practically, this means a high, glazed frontage and an interior that uses a Scandi minimalism template which consists of a lot wood cladding and cream walls, coupled with tech of the kind that actually makes shoppers want to take a look at it, rather than walking swiftly by. 

In total, this is a neutral look, but the general brightness of the H&M stock makes it the focus, which is surely the point. It also, like Primark of late, shows that cost-conscious fashion can be every bit as design-led as stores higher up the value chain.  

  

 

FNAC, Al Nakheel Mall, Riyadh 

Often described as a merchandise mix that could only work in France, the musical instruments-meets-tech-meets-white goods- meets books offer that is FNAC does in fact find favour beyond the Gallic border.  

A quick walk around the newly opened branch in Riyadh serves to show how effective a highlight feature can be in drawing the gaze through a large space. In this instance, the store is a monochrome thing, but at the back of the ground floor the escalator that takes shoppers to the upper level is surrounded in translucent orange Perspex. This is about turning an operational element of this interior into a major drawer.  

The fact that widely different categories have been placed next to each other doesn’t matter as the visitor is drawn across each floor by the combination of light, space, white walls and a blacked-out ceiling void that ensures the eye is kept on the product. 

And of course, in the land of coffee-drinking, there is a café.  

  

 

Dyson, SoHo, NYC  

The building that houses the second Dyson store in Manhattan, for which the eponymous Sir James paid $60m in 2023, is an altogether more hushed affair than the original branch that opened on Fifth Avenue in 2018.  

From the outset, this is a black box in which areas have been lit to provide a modern art gallery-like ambiance with the products – hairdryers, heaters, headphones and suchlike, becoming the objects of adoration.  

There is also a massive screen at the back of the store, surrounded by blackness, on which moving mood content is displayed – it cannot be ignored.  

It would be easy to be unaware of the fact that there is a blow-dry studio upstairs where customers can emerge looking better than when they went in, but this is a store that really does surprise at almost every turn.     

  

 

Newstores delivers daily updates on new store designs and formats from around the world. For more information go to: www.newstores.co.uk