Case file 05: Left unbuilt

Case file 05: Left unbuilt.

Bureau St. James · Store concepts and rollout

The question: what if a store worked like a medina, with no fixed fixtures and no set path?

The Sahel is the band where the Sahara gives way to grassland. Its name comes from the Arabic for shore. For centuries gold came up from the south, from the fields of Bambuk and Bure, and salt came down from the north, cut in slabs at Taghaza, where Ibn Battuta found houses built of it in 1352. They met in towns you’ve heard of: Timbuktu, Djenné, Gao. Timbuktu made little of its own. It was where things met.

Medina is Arabic for city. Its lanes are set by the trades in them: leather here, cloth there, metal round the corner. Nobody drew a path. People found one.

Most stores start from the fixtures. The departments get drawn first, then the walls, then the path the customer is meant to walk. A medina starts from the frame, and the makers fill it.

The shape of the answer was a bare grid of frames the makers fill pattern on pattern, turning from morning market to evening gathering, with no cash desk.

The drawing shows the same grid twice. In the morning every bay is a stall hung with cloth. By evening the stalls close up at the edges and the middle is given to people under lanterns.

It stayed on paper. The question still works on any store: which parts have to be fixed, and which could change by the hour?

Which part of yours would you un-fix first? Let’s talk.

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