Store of the Week: Marine motifs in Némeau, Quebec

Canadian fish retailer Némeau’s new store in Lévis, across the St Lawrence river from Quebec City, is an exercise in taking an increasingly expensive, but nonetheless workaday, food category and turning it into something extraordinary.

Montreal-based designer Jean de Lessard says that the spirit of adventure embodied in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was the inspiration for the interior, the majority of which has been fashioned from ceramic tiles, metal, Corian and glass.

The undoubted highlight of the store is the sculptural glass ceiling that mixes shades of blue with white to create a prismatic appearance, intended to remind the shopper of the refraction of light on the sea, according to de Lessard.

Equally, the white and grey ceramic tiling evokes the wood planking of a boat. All of this brings the visitor back to the seafood, which is displayed in white, polyhedral chillers in the midshop and around the perimeter.

This is an unusual example of a store design that mimics the provenance of the product that it houses.