The former occupant of Ilva’s Gateshead store was Marks & Spencer, which canned its disastrous Lifestore format only a few months after it opened. In terms of design, there was quite a lot that was good about that shop, it’s just that it was in Gateshead – a destination not known for cutting-edge homewares and, least of all, for singing the praises of minimalist interiors.
The Scandinavian retailer had also set up shop at one of the retail parks at Lakeside, with Next, Habitat and ScS Upholstery as neighbours. This branch took an age to open and was dogged by difficulties prior to flinging wide its doors, partly because of its insistence on taking out large numbers of internal pillars to create wide-open vistas, which was rumoured to have compromised the building’s structural integrity.
When it did open, customers were thin on the ground, preferring instead the lower-cost alterative that is Ikea – a stone’s throw away – alongside the many other budget homewares offers to be found at this location.
What chance, therefore, for a retailer where the proposition included Chinese basalt for the frontage, acres of space within and the kind of café that wouldn’t look out of place in some of Milan’s more chi-chi hangouts (albeit the view over a car park was not that great). Well, as events have shown, not much.
And there’s the point. It’s one thing to have a great-looking store – and the Lakeside shop certainly is – but quite another to get people through the doors. Despite its geographical proximity, Lakeside is as different from Bluewater as Bluewater is from the West End. Ilva might have had a fighting chance if sufficiently large premises could have been found on, say, the King’s Road or maybe Islington, but it was always onto a hiding to nothing at Lakeside.
This makes a very simple point that devotees of the Phil and Kirstie show will be aware of – location is all. The best-looking stores will have little chance if the offer – and the way a store looks is included within this – does not accord with the local demographic. Or, put another way, wrong thing, wrong place, wrong time. A pity really, because all this means is that well-designed homewares stores may not make it off the drawing board, on the grounds that the mass market won’t tolerate it. Lakeside shoppers have much to answer for.
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