de Young Museum Store

Charles Sparks + Company successfully applied best-practices principles of retail planning and design for the Museum store in the de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California. After 10 years of bureaucratic hurdles following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which rendered the original building unsafe, a team of consultants was assembled to create a new landmark building that would integrate art, architecture, and the natural landscape. For the integration of retail and expanded facilities, Charles Sparks + Company was chosen during planning phases in November 2001 by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to ensure that the museum would maximize its opportunities for effective retail and not make the costly mistakes many other museums typically make as a result of inexperienced retail planning or impractical design. We developed a comprehensive business plan for the store, which addressed everything from mapping the visitor experience to merchandising, from financial benchmarking to design and layout, and from operation to staffing. Our plan formed the foundation for the design and execution of the 5,950-square-foot, two-level store strategically located near the main court gathering space at the heart of the museum’s circulation.

A Concept of the “Dynamic Environment”

By crafting stories around products and groupings, which we call the “dynamic environment,” visitors are inspired to emotionally engage with products across a dimensional landscape of fixtures and presentation. We convinced the de Young that the most common mistake many museums make is approaching the design and layout of the store as a gallery, not as a boutique. The store was designed to involve visitors in the retail experience through appropriate and flexible lighting for the inspection and handling of merchandise, the ability to present groupings of related merchandise for the “storytelling” of larger ideas, and the impact required to stimulate add-on sales.

A Concept to Blend Seamlessly

The new museum was centered on the overall idea of blending art, architecture, and the natural landscape of San Francisco’s beloved Golden Gate Park. The store location and layout flows easily from the main court and connects two levels with an internal stair along what is called “the preferred path.” The division of merchandise categories was planned so that the ground floor, with its adjacency to the museum’s main gathering area, would receive the majority of the incidental traffic or visitors entering in the midst of their overall experience. This level of the store includes a vast array of distinctive decorative objects, jewelry, home and office accessories, and textiles from around the world.

The lower level is the primary location for “destination” merchandise, featuring a wide range of art books and museum publications, educational children’s books and toys, posters, prints, and stationery related to the museum’s collections. Technology was included with the integration of an art-on-demand interactive kiosk.

Designed for a Diverse Range of Products

Materials, finishes, and design were developed to showcase a diverse range of merchandise inspired by the museum’s educational mission and collections of the arts from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; textiles; and modern, contemporary, and American art. The fixture design allowed for mobility of presentation and versatility for change. The multilevel store is intended to recall the distinctive landscape of Golden Gate Park, with angular, darkly stained and vertical dividers and tables that evoke the trees surrounding the museum. The concept provides a timeless background for a wide range of product mix.

Strategic Lighting in the Dynamic Environment

Approaching the store as a boutique and not as a gallery meant we had to prioritize a lighting strategy that would creatively blend a pattern of general illumination established for common areas of the museum while introducing a custom-designed, combined, and adjustable accent light fixture to meet the demands of versatility and contrast on the merchandise statements. Indirect lighting effects along the perimeter and glowing showcases were designed to “float” the merchandise away from their backgrounds, drawing attention to products and acting as what we call visual “attractors.”