The great outdoors

Forget Bristol. Head west down the M5 and you come to the true gateway to the Southwest: Exeter. It’s the jumping-off point for hordes of outdoor-pursuit enthusiasts and whether mountain boarding, kayaking or sailing is your thing, this is where many fresh-air forays start.

From here, the Devon coast is only a 15 minute drive away, Dartmoor, less than an hour and marginally further lies the Cornish peninsula and the end of southern England. It’s a small wonder, then, that a retailer specialising in outdoor wear for the young and young-at-heart should choose to open a store in this ancient cathedral city.

The retailer is Fat Face and last Saturday it opened an architecturally ambitious 6,000 sq ft (555 sq m) three-floor store, at the triangular end of one of the entrances to the Princesshay shopping centre, which launched two weeks ago.

Stand outside this building and you might begin to feel that you are looking at a little slice of the Southwest. Curved, red sandstone blocks form a one storey-high smooth pillar at the apex of the triangle. Immediately to the right of this is the store entrance, with a large Fat Face logo set beneath a curved balcony. Around the corner to the right, massive 7m-high windows add to the drama.

To the right of the store entrance, the second side of the triangle features a window filled with wood sections that are intended to imitate the contours of the Dartmoor landscape.

From the outset, this is a shop that looks different to any other in the city. It is also different from almost every other store in the 145-store strong Fat Face portfolio. Sarah Bascomb, the retailer’s brand communications director, says: “We have always had a philosophy of being beyond the cookie cutter. Every store is different, because we like different.” The problem with this approach, however, is that it works when a retailer is relatively modest in size, but once growth starts to kick-in, there is a limit to how far this can be taken on an in-house basis.

For this reason, at the beginning of the year, Bascomb invited a number of design companies to pitch for the task of creating an interior that could be varied as well as adopted by other stores. London-based design consultancy HMKM emerged victorious and in August, it launched an earlier version of the Exeter format at Bluewater.

Bascomb says the final exterior and interior design of the Exeter store was the product of work carried out with HMKM and that this partnership “brought an architectural and design expertise that we didn’t have. It added a bit of sharpness to the theatre”.

Inside, much of what is on show will be familiar to Fat Face devotees, but the overall shape and feel is an unfamiliar experience. The ground floor houses menswear and a variance from the norm is apparent, immediately, because a boat sits in the centre of the floor against the pistachio green, curved staircase.

This is, in fact, the first Fat Face store where shoppers can pick up a little sporting hardware as well pre- and après-sport clothing.

However, the dinghy advertised as on sale is not something that customers are able to walk away with. Fat Face has organised partnerships with suppliers of sporting equipment, so that orders can be placed in-store for boats and other equipment. If shoppers are really desperate to hurt themselves, they can buy a mountain board (a skateboard for downhill kamikazes) and head for the hills, ready to cover their newly purchased Fat Face clothing in blood. Bascomb emphasises that, while the equipment on sale is for rugged, outdoors types, it is all pitched at beginners in order to keep the franchise as wide as possible.

The men’s floor has a number of distinct features. The wild, untamed outdoor ethic is prevalent, with materials like raw steel and wood, but these have been softened with shelving coated in pistachio-coloured rubber. Cantilevered wall fixtures rise from the perimeter and peel away at the top to create canopies for the clothing offer.

It is also difficult to ignore the fitting rooms on this floor. Made from sailcloth and taking the form of an outsize duffel bag, they can be fastened with a toggle when someone is inside. Ordinance Survey maps have been attached to the exterior of these and again, the theme is preparing to go on a trip. For those who want to venture further into the store, the bicycle reflector-style signage makes navigation straightforward.

Head upstairs via the oak-planked staircase and you are on the women’s and children’s floor. This is the largest of the three levels and much of the wall space is taken up by giant, painted murals. Bascomb says that there is a two-man, in-house team that paints the graffiti-style murals that define the staircase and second floor.

This floor, like the others, features pieces of burnt-orange steel that have been twisted to create two-dimensional shapes, such as the outline of a Volkswagen camper van and draw on the brand’s heritage. The steel artwork is used as a display device for the surfboards on offer on the women’s floor.

Again, here the fitting rooms stand out. They are high-gloss, red, circular pods, fashioned from fibreglass. Each pod has wallpaper featuring imagery of savage animals. Depending on which pod you are in, you may be privy to a Lake District mountain vista or find yourself in a Costa Rican jungle.

The floor has been created from reclaimed timber planks that have been arranged to run in parallel with the overhead lighting rigs. Empty, plastic, water cooler-style demijohns have been used as display features, promoting a semi-industrial feel.

Go up another floor and you arrive at the top of the store. There is a café – another Fat Face first – and an information point, where you can look up what’s on offer in the Southwest via a computer. What Fat Face calls “world screens” show video footage of the brand’s outdoor action team being put through their paces and there is even a pod where you can don headphones and 3D glasses to experience the rush of falling backwards off a cliff.

Finally, each floor has a glass-fronted counter filled with books laid on top of each other, the spines of which have been printed with slogans from past Fat Face t-shirts. Bascomb says that these books were publishers’ left-over stock, due to be pulped, but that they were reinvented to attract additional interest.

It is understood that building the Exeter store cost about£1 million – a tidy sum in any retailer’s book. The store does, however, set Fat Face apart from its rivals and created a stir a day ahead of its opening last Friday. A 1,700 sq ft (160 sq m) store in a similar vein will open at Canary Wharf in November. Fat Face’s transition from small independent to alternative, larger retailer is definitely under way.