Liberty in the name of luxury

Liberty, the department store that used to be a Regent Street landmark, has been through more than its fair share of change during the past few years. Until recently, perhaps, the most obvious was its disappearance in 2007 from the street that it had done much to define and which led to the arrival in this country of Cos and Desigual, both of which occupy units created from the vacated space.

The outcome was that Liberty retreated to the mock-Tudor meets Arts and Crafts building on Great Marlborough Street. Some seasoned observers were even saying that perhaps its time was up. This feeling was reinforced by the fact that millions had been spent on giving the Regent Street part of Liberty a complete makeover in the early years of this decade, a move that yielded many design and architectural prizes at the time but failed to deliver increased sales.

Yet walk through the doors of this astonishing-looking, albeit smaller, department store today and it is apparent that things have moved on once more. Large portions of the internal landscape have been changed, as the retailer moves to confirm its position as a leading purveyor of uber-luxury, design-led merchandise, according to Liberty head of visual identity Maxine Groucutt

And almost everything has been achieved without touching the fabric of the store, which, even allowing for its listed status, is pretty much sacrosanct as far as its management are concerned.

This, then, is a story of a store makeover that is almost entirely about visual merchandising and old-style shopfitting of the kind that involves craftsmanship, rather than straightforward installation.

The makeover is part of the company’s “Retail Renaissance”; a broader strategy put in place by chief executive Geoffrey de La Bourdonnaye, who joined Liberty in 2007, having previously been president of Christian Lacroix.

And in spite of the changes not being structural, this has been a major undertaking that has involved the relocation of many departments and the feeling that, in parts, this is almost a different retail space. The ground floor jewellery room, for example,  has become a scarf room, brimful (inevitably) of investment purchase names such as Fendi, Dries Van Noten, Gucci and, of course, Liberty of London.

Achieving this has meant shifting the jewellery offer into an atrium space at the heart of the store, where it sits alongside luxury handbags with intimidating, but comfortable-looking, black sofas. Here those with lots of money can loll about while they consider a present for themselves or somebody (presumably) they care about.

Room full of contrasts

The curious thing about this area of the ground floor is the contrast between the contemporary merchandise elements and the traditional fabric of the room itself. The space has back-lit shelves, home to handbags, and minimalist glass jewellery display cases in the mid-floor, with white Corian cabinets beneath them.

Couple all of this with the square chandeliers overhead and you have a space where contrasts are almost the norm and there is also something of the sense of a museum such as the V&A. This is principally owing to the contemporary stock and the building itself.

Then there’s “The Bazaar”. This part of the ground floor is intended to serve as a reminder of the store’s roots, where shoppers can pick up one-off or eclectic pieces of the kind Liberty founder Arthur Lasenby Liberty might have found while on his Far Eastern merchandise-seeking travels. According to the Liberty press blurb, this area is planned to be the space where frequent shoppers will “pop in… to find what’s newly arrived that week”.

Maybe so, although deep pockets and a devil-may-care attitude towards price may be needed for those for whom this is to be a reality.

On the first floor many of the changes have been about reviewing the brand mix, rather than the in-store appearance, although the “Avant Garde” room, which forms part of the central atrium, benefits from a new matt black floor. Impressive lighting is a central part of what has been done.

The “Essentials” and “Contemporary” rooms on the same floor have anthracite rails running through them, as well as octagonal mirrored fitting rooms that form free-standing pods.

It is probably also worth mentioning that additional areas include a re-launched shoe boutique, an international room and a vintage offer – which translates as collections from the late 1980s and early 1990s, at present.

People like liberty to change and they expect this to happen

Maxine Groucutt, Liberty

It is the detail, however, that marks this store revamp as something worth taking a detour from Regent Street for. For a start, there is the edifice itself. Groucutt says: “I work in a beautiful building, with fantastic people and with incredible product. How can you fail to appreciate the building? We have an appreciation for what’s there and we work with it.”

This might account for Richard Easton, managing director of Portsmouth-based Hadley Shopfitters, saying that much of the work on the project involved refurbishing what was already in place. “We recycled and refurbished some of the existing cabinets, as well as making some of it new,” he explains.

According to Easton, among other things, the restoration meant installing new wooden floors in some places and re-staining the wood in others.

It is interesting that Hadley was chosen to make design consultant Richard Moore’s vision for the new-look Liberty a reality. Hadley worked on the Regent Street makeover in 2002 and seven years later has been hired once more, following a pitch in October last year.

The equipment recycling is unlikely to have saved Liberty much money. At this end of the market, the cost of refurbishment is frequently equal to the price of creating something new, but it is fundamental if a sense of brand continuity is to be maintained.

It is also surprising how quickly a largely cosmetic makeover can be effected if plans are in place and retailer, store designer and shopfitter are of a single mind. Easton says that he was on site from January 5 until Valentine’s Day this year, a mere six weeks, in which time the entire project was completed.

Much has altered for anybody who has worked at Liberty for more than a couple of years, according to Groucutt. “Things have changed dramatically over the six years that I’ve been here and things have changed a lot over the last year, while the project’s been going on. But people have a relationship with Liberty, they like it to change and they expect this to happen. It makes visiting more exciting,” she says.

She adds that the latest set of changes have been about taking an inherently interesting product and “the job is then to give it a point of difference: to present it in a different way”.

This project stands as an example of what can be done without calling in the builders, knocking down walls and reconfiguring a space. From the visual merchandising to the shopfitting, much is different, but many of the changes are cosmetic. Where new pieces of equipment have been installed, they are sympathetic to what already exists.

And if you were asked whether a standalone scarf room sounded like a good idea, you might be inclined to reply negatively. But walk around this discrete area and touches such as a Zebra’s head, that appears to burst through the wall and a long line of mannequin heads showing how scarves can be worn, mean that the space works – along with most of the other new areas in the store.

And one last thing. There must be few places where you can put your head into a tall, red-framed glass cylinder (a bit like the sort of thing they used to beam people up to in Star Trek) and get an expensive scent wafted up your nostrils. There are in fact three of these. You select the smell you wish to inhale, a sample is sprayed into the cylinder and away you go as an internal fan pushes the scent into your face. This may sound like an expensive way of selling perfume – it probably is – but it is part and parcel of a super-luxury experience.

Liberty may be considerably smaller than it was a few years ago, but it remains a retail environment that would be impossible to copy and which has a heritage that is clear from the moment you step through the door. The difficult bit to forecast is whether this latest remodelling of a retail old faithful will yield the kind of results that are required to keep the whole show rolling.

Until relatively recently, it was supposed that luxury retailers were going to prove immune to the vagaries of the recession as the super-rich surfed their private wave of affluence.

However, the results that have emerged from retailers such as Harvey Nichols this year have roundly disproved this particular view and therefore it will probably be a matter of top-end merchants having to run faster. On this showing, Liberty is sprinting.